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POLITICAL ESSAYS. 



BY 

PARKE GODWIN 



[From Contributions to Putnam's Magazine.] 



■^ 



NEW YORK: 

DIX, EDWARDS & CO., 321 BROADWAY. 

1856. 






Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1856, by 

DIX, EDWARDS & CO., 

In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States 

for the Southern District of New York. 



TO 

CHARLES SUMNER. 

My dear Sumner: 

I TAKE the liberty of dedicating this volume to 
you, because I know of no one more likely to 
approve its general objects, or whose name will lend 
it greater honor. Before you were prostrated by the 
hand of violence, you stood first in the admiration 
of your young countrymen — but now, the effect of 
that cowardly blow has been, to make you first also 
in their sympathy and love. 

I have the honor to be. 

Your Friend^ 

PARKE GODWIN. 



CONTENTS. 



PAOB. 

Our Parties and Politics .... 1 

The Vestiges of Despotism . , . 57 

Our Foreign Influence and Policy . . 89 

Annexation 128 

"America for the Americans" . . 175 

Should we Fear the Pope? . . . 210 

The Great Question .... 250 

Northern or Southern, which? . . .280 

Kansas must be Free .... 307 



OUR PARTIES AND POLITICS. 

Foreigners complain that they cannot easily 
understand our political parties, and we do not 
wonder at it, because those parties do not al- 
ways understand themselves. Their contro- 
versies, like the old homoousian disputes of the 
church, often turn upon such niceties of dis- 
tinction, that to discern their differences requires 
optics as sharp as those of Butler's hero, who 
could 

" Sever aud divide 



Betwixt northwest and northwest side." 

What with whigs, democratic whigs, demo- 
crats, true democrats, barnburners, hunkers, 
silver grays, woolly heads, soft shells, hard 
shells, national reformers, fire-eaters, and filli- 
busteros, it is easy to imagine how the exotic 
intellect should get perplexed ! Even to our 
native and readier apprehensions, the diversity 

of principle hidden under this diversity of 
1 



POLITICAL ESSAYS. 



names is not always palpable ; while it must 
be confessed, that our parties are not universally 
so consistent with themselves as to enable one 
to write their distinctive creeds in a horn-book. 

Yet, on a closer sui^ey, it will be found 
that parties here are very much the same, in 
their characteristic tendencies and aims, as 
parties elsewhere. They originate in that 
human nature wliich is the same everywhere 
(modified by local circumstances only), and 
they exhibit, under the various influences of 
personal constitution, ambition, interest, etc., 
the same contrasts of selfishness and virtue, of 
craft and honesty, of genius and falsehood, of 
wisdom and folly. 

It is true that our differences are not seem- 
ingly so fundamental and-^well-pronouuced iis 
those of older nations. We have no contests 
here as the elementary principles of govern- 
ment. A monarchist is, perhaps, not to be found 
from the St. Lawrence to the Rio Grande, any 
more than a rhinoceros or lammergeyer. We 
are all republicans; we all believe in the su- 
premacy of the people ; and our convictions, 
as to the general nature and sphere of legis- 



OUR PARTIES AND POLITICS. 3 

lation, are as uniform as if they had been pro- 
duced by a mental ambrotype. 

But within the range of this more general 
unanimity, there has been room and verge 
enough, for the evolution of many lieated and 
distempered antagonisms. We are agreed that 
our governments shall be republican, but as to 
what functions they should exercise and what 
they should leave to the people we are not 
agreed ; we agree that the separate States shall 
be sovereign and independent, but to what ex- 
tent they may carry that sovereignty and in- 
dependence we do not agree ; we agree that 
the benefits of the Federal Union shall be, from 
time to time, extended to new territories, but 
on what terms they may be extended we do 
not agree ; we agree, generally, to keep aloof 
from the domestic affairs of other nations, but 
as to the details of our foreign policy inside of 
this salutary rule, we do not agree. There have 
been among us always, on all these points, 
radical dissents and oppositions. We have 
parties of many stripes and calibres — some 
which favor, and some w^iich oppose, a larger 
concentration ol' power in the Federal Govern- 



4 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

ment ; some which propose to accomplish their 
social objects by legislative, and others by 
voluntary action ; some which desire to restrict 
the elective franchise, and others to extend it ; 
some which repel the acquisition of more ter- 
ritory, and others willing to mn the risk of war 
for its sake ; some which aim at the destruction 
of the Union, and. others eager to sacrifice honor 
and liberty itself to the preservation of the 
Union. In short, there is among our difterences 
of opinion, an endless scope for the fomiation of 
parties. 

It is a common saying, we know, that there 
can be but two parties in any nation — the 
movement and the stationary parties — and this 
is true as a philosophical generalization, de- 
duced from the changes of large periods of time ; 
but it is not true always as a contemporary and 
actual fact. In the long run, of course, all 
parties will be found to have advanced or re- 
tarded the progress of society ; but in the im- 
mediate and present aspect of things, parties 
are more than two — are half a dozen at least. 
Look where we will, provided free political dis- 
cussion is allowed, and we shall lind, to use the 



OUR PARTIES AND POLITICS. 6 

French mode of marking their relations, a 
centre, a right, a left, a right centre, and a left 
centre, besides a miscellaneous herd of eccen- 
trics, each representing some contrast or gra- 
dation of opinion. In France, for instance, 
before France was reduced by the bayonet to 
a single man, there were the several branches 
of the legitimists, the Napoleonites, the repub- 
licans, the mountain, and the socialists ; and in 
Great Britain, there are the tories, the whigs, 
the radicals, the chartists, etc. In the same 
way, in this country, we possess the several 
combinations to which we referred in the open- 
ing paragraph ; and though their diiferences, as 
we have said, are not so marked as those which 
prevail between the legitimists and the repub- 
licans of Europe, they are still valid, positive, 
and important. 

The earliest parties known to our history 
were those of the colonial times, when the 
grand debate as to the rights of the colonies 
was getting under way, and all men took sides, 
either as whigs or tories. They had imported 
their distinctive names, and to some extent 
their distinctive principles, from the mother 



POLITICAL ESSAYS. 



country, from the iron times of Cromwell and 
the Puritans ; but, in the progress of the con- 
troversy, as it often happens, they were led 
upon wholly new and vastly broader grounds 
of dispute than they had at first dreamed. The 
little squabble, as to the limits and reaches of 
the imperial jurisdiction, expanded into a war 
for national existence, nay, for the rights of 
humanity ; and what was at the outset a violent 
talk only about stamp-duties, and taxes on tea 
— mean and trivial even in its superficial as- 
pects — concealed the noblest political theories, 
the sublimest political experiments, that had 
yet been recorded in the annals of our race. 
The whigs of the Revolution gave to the world 
a new idea — that of a state founded upon the 
inherent freedom and dignity of the individual 
man. Gathering out of the ages all the aspira- 
tions of great and noble, souls, all the yearnings 
of oppressed peoples, they had concentrated 
them into one grand act of emancipation. They 
actualized the dreams of time, and in the latest 
era of the world, and on a new continent, in- 
troduced, as they fondly supposed, that reign 
of heavenly justice which the primitive golden 



OUR PARTIES AND POLITICS. 7 

ages had faintly foreshadowed, wliich patriots 
had so long struggled and sighed for in vain, 
and which the political martyrs of eveiy clime 
had welcomed only in beatific vision. 

It was this patriot party of the Revolution 
which gave the inspiration and original impulse 
to our nation, which formed its character and 
sentiment, and erected the standard of opinion, 
which was destined, for some years, at least, to 
be the guide of all our movements. It fused 
the national mind by the warmth of its con- 
victions, or rather by the fiery earnestness of 
them, into that single thought of democratic 
freedom wliicli has been the ground and sub- 
stance of our national unity. The medley of 
settlers, chance-wafted hitherward, from the 
several corners of Europe, like seeds borne by 
the winds, were nourished by it into an organic 
whole, and have since been retained by its 
influences, under all diversities of constitu- 
tion, climate, and interest, in the coherence 
and uniformity of a national being. Our 
fathers were so not merely after the flesh, but 
after the spirit. They generated our minds as 
well as our bodies, and their sublime thought 



8 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

of a free state (an inspiration greater tlian their 
knowledge), lias been the frLiitful genn of our 
best inward and outward life. No other people 
have had so grand a national origin; for w^e 
were born in a disinterested war for human 
rights, and not for territorj^ and under the 
stimulus of an idea which still transcends the 
highest practical achievements of our race. 

It has been the greatness, the predominance, 
the profound inherency of this original Ameri- 
can idea, wiiich, forcing a general conviction, 
has produced the comparative uniformity 
of our parties, and confined their divisions 
to transient or trivial and personal differ- 
ences. But there is also another cause for 
that uniformity, in the fact that as societies ad- 
vance in the career of civilization, their politi- 
cal divisions are less marked, but more subtle 
in principle ; less gross, but more indirect in 
the display of animosity and feeling. The rival 
chiefs of two factions of savages, who quarrel as 
to which shall eat tlie other, settle the matter 
with a blow of the tomahawk; but in a more 
refined community, the entire population may 
ffet at loGfCferheads, over the construction of a 



OUR PARTIES AND POLITICS. 9 

phrase in some dubious document, which they 
determine by vociferous clamors at a public 
meetiitg, or in able leading articles. One 
is sometimes amused, therefore, when a 
foreigner in the United States — an English- 
man, for instance — complacently remarks that 
we have no great parties, no profound ra- 
dical, comprehensive questions, about which 
we may beat out each other's brains. — 
*' You have no question of church and state," 
he says ; " no immense projects for parliament- 
ary reform ; no tremendous interests hanging 
upon some old law ; no widely-separated and 
powerful classes to be plunged into fierce and 
terrific conflicts. All that you quarrel about is 
summed up in the per centage of a tariff, the 
building of a railroad, or the possession of 
a few offices." In saying this, John imagines 
that he has reduced us to a lilliputian insigni- 
ficance and littleness, especially by the side of 
his obese and ponderous magnitude. But we 
answer him, that those " great questions," 
about which he and his fellows, all the world 
over, are pummeling each other, or at least, 

tearing their passions to tatters, were settled 
1* 



10 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

for us before we were born, and that we esteem 
it a happiness and glory to have got rid of 
them, even though they have left us little more 
to quarrel about than the cut of a neighbor's 
coat, or the shape of his nose. We also hint to 
him, further, that the progress of nations, as we 
conceive it, consists in the gradual decay of 
political, and the growth of social questions, 
or, in other words, in the simplification and re- 
duction of the machinery of government, with 
which politics have chiefly to do, and the conse- 
quent extinction of politicians, who become 
more and more a pernicious class, with, at the 
same time, a continuous aggrandizement of so- 
ciety itself, of its industry, its arts, its local 
improvements, and its freedom as well as order. 
The most natural and the most permanent 
of our past political divisions has arisen out 
of the peculiar structure of the federal govern- 
ment, the nature and extent of its jurisdiction, 
and its relations to the States. As soon as the 
Federal Constitution went into effect, the 
differences which had almost defeated its ratifi- 
cation before the people — the counteracting 
centripetal and centrifugal forces, as they are 



OUR PARTIES AND POLITICS. 11 

called — were developed into strong and positive 
party hostilities. The federalists and the anti- 
federalists took possession of the political field, 
and the noise of their conflicts sounded 
through many years, giving a sting to the 
debates of the Senate House, embittering 
the intercourse of domestic life, and bequeath- 
ing prejudices to the minds of posterity. 

The mere disputes as to the authority of 
the general government might not, perhaps, 
have led to such earnest and envenomed bat- 
tles, at the outset, if they had not been com- 
plicated, especially under the leadership of 
Jefferson and Hamilton, with the profounder 
questions of individual rights just then agitat- 
ing the Old World. Hamilton, a man of talent, 
bred in camps, distrustful of the masses, an 
admirer of the British Constitution, and accus- 
tomed to the rigor of military rule, was disposed 
to rely upon the strong arm of government, 
and may be regarded as the representative of 
the sentiment of law : while Jefferson, on the 
other hand, a man of genius, self-confident, 
generous, sanguine, tolerant of theories, an 
acolyte, if not a teacher, of the French school 



12 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

of manners and thought, leaned to the sponta- 
neous action of the people, and was the repre- 
sentative of LIBERTY. Thus, the party of 
State rights and the party of liberty came to be 
identified, and took the name, after a time, of 
the democratic republican party, while feder- 
alism, or the doctrine of a strong central gov- 
ernment, jumped in naturally with the doctrine 
of law and order. There was a double pres- 
sure of tendencies separating the two parties, 
and intensifying their hatreds, and, in the ex- 
acerbations of the times, inducing them to 
accuse each other respectively of tyranny and 
licentiousness. A federalist, in the opinions of 
the republicans of those days, was only a mon- 
archist in disguise, watching his opportunity to 
strangle the infant liberties of his country in 
the cradle, and to restore the emancipated 
colonies to their dependence upon Great Bri- 
tain, while the federalist retorted the generous 
imputation of his adversary, by calling him a 
jacobin, a scoundrel, and a demagogue, eager to 
uproot the foundations of order, and let loose 
the lees and scum of French infidelity and 
French immorality upon society. We, at this 



OUR PARTIES AND POLITICS. 13 

day, looking through the serener atmosphere 
of history, know that they were both mistaken 
ill their extreme opinions, and that they were 
both good patriots after all, necessary to each 
other, as it now appears, in tempering the dan- 
gerous excesses which might have followed the 
unchecked predominance of either, and in giv- 
insf a more uniform and stable action to our 
untried political system. But we cannot con- 
ceal the deep significance of the contest in 
which they were engaged. 

In all the subsequent changes of parties, the 
distinction of federalist and anti-federalist 
has been maintained, in theory at least, 
and sometimes in name, if not so rigidly 
in practice. It is a distinction that will 
only pass away with the final establishment 
of the truth, though it may often be ob- 
scured in the fluctuating movements of poli- 
tics. During the war of 1S12-15, the Federal- 
ists, as they were termed, were the most vigor- 
ous opponents of the use of power by the 
general government, and their most ofiensive 
acts — the proceedings of the Hartford Conven- 
tion — were nothing worse than an attempt, as 



14 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

it was deemed, to arrest and restrain the en- 
croachments of the central authority upon the 
rights and interests of the separate States ; 
whilst, on the other hand, the most enormous 
exercise of that authority — the acquisition of 
Louisiana by Jefferson — the suppression of 
South Carolina nullification by Jackson — the 
annexation of Texas by Tyler — have been re- 
sorted to by the leaders of the so-called demo- 
cratic or anti-federalist party. Indeed, so little 
consistency has been exhibited by parties in 
this respect, that it has been observed, that in 
general, whatever party is in possession of the 
federal government is disposed to push the use 
of its functions to the utmost practicable 
verge, while the party out of power opposes 
this use, and assumes the virtue of continence. 
Under the administration of Jackson, when the 
struffsle with the National Bank arose, the 

CO 

lines of demarcation between the principles of 
the federalists and anti-federalists were once 
more somewhat strictly drawn, and the shib- 
boleths and rallying cries of that day have 
continued to be used by the politicians, for the 
most part impertinently, up to the present 



OUR PARTIES AND POLITICS. 15 

time. In the administration of the States, too, 
there has been an undeniable line drawn, a 
gulf fixed, as we may say, between the friends 
of a strong and centralized government and the 
friends of social and popular freedom ; but we 
may add, that as no party is now entitled to a 
monopoly of either class, this distinction has 
subsided. The feelings and convictions in 
which it originated have not passed aw^ay, and 
they will not speedily pass away ; but there 
has been a lull in the public mind, in respect 
to them, partly produced by the decided gravi- 
tation of opinion to the democratic theory both 
of Federal and State Government, and partly 
by the emergencies of new grounds of conflict. 
The debris of former convulsions is all that the 
older parties have left us. 

An anomaly in the social system of some of 
the States, how^ever, not supposed, when the 
Federal Union was formed, to be so pregnant 
with consequences, as it has since proved, has 
been a chief cause of the complication of 
parties, and the principal incentive and danger 
of our more modern contests. 

The primary idea of our institutions was, as 



16 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

we have seen, that of a free Democratic Repub- 
lic. The liberty and equality of the people 
were the animating spirit of our revolution, 
and the inspiring genius of the constitutional 
structure to which it gave rise. But among 
the States, which form the elements of the 
confederacy, there are some not strictly demo- 
cratic, and scarcely republican. They are aris- 
tocracies or oligarchies, built upon a diversity 
of races. Their political and social privileges 
are confined to a class, while all the rest of their 
inhabitants are slaves. 

The consequence has been a growing diver- 
gency, though it was not always apparent or 
even suspected, between the convictions, the 
interests and the tendencies of one half the 
Union, which was eminently free and democra- 
tic, and those of the other half, which was 
slaveholding and aristocratic. 

The reasons why this difference was not 
so strongly felt at the outset, were, because the 
slaves were few, and the great and good men 
who formed the Union, and helped to knit and 
bind together its primitive filaments, were 
almost unanimous in the sentiment, that this 



OUR PARTIES AND POLITICS. 17 

system of bondage would be only temporary. 
Like a growing youth in the flush and im- 
pulse of liis young strength, they were scarcely 
conscious of the cancer lurking in the blood. 

But the vicCj contrary to their expectations, 
has developed itself — the sentiment in regard 
to it has chancred — it has become interwoven 
with vast and intricate interests, and it is now 
sustained positively by political and philoso- 
phical argument 

Another reason why the radical vices of the 
federal relation were not more speedily extruded 
and discovered, was this : the slaveholders have 
been, for the most part, in alliance with the 
democratic or popular party. Devoted stick- 
lers for equality among themselves, fierce lovers 
of their own liberties, which were to be secured 
from the molestation of others only by a rigid 
maintenance of the sovereignty of the sepa- 
rate States, they have naturally sympathized 
with the party which appeared to be most 
devoted to these ends. Their sentiment of per- 
sonal independence and right was the same sen- 
timent which animates the masses of the free 
States in their opposition to the encroachments 



18 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

of power, while their need of security dictated 
the same doctrine of State-rights, to which 
the people adhered in their instinct for local self- 
government. Thus, the democratic party of 
the North, and the State-rights party of the 
South, have formed what was called the great 
Republican party of the Union. The model 
democrats of the nation, Jefferson, who wrote 
the Declaration of Independence, Madison, who 
was one of the ablest expounders of the Con- 
stitution, Macon, who tolerated no injustice in 
legislation, were slaveholders in their local 
spheres ; while the popular party of the North, 
clamoring against the pretensions of law and 
privilege for a larger liberty, were still, strange 
to say, their adherents and friends. 

It was an alliance, however, which, in the 
very nature of its components, could not en- 
dure forever. An aristocracy is compelled, by 
the exigencies of its position, to become con- 
servative ; while a democracy, on the other 
hand, is progressive. A league between them 
may be maintained, so long as they have cer- 
tain objects in common — an enemy to repulse, 
or a conquest to achieve — but when these 



OUR PARTIES AND POLITICS. 19 

common objects are attained, their radical in- 
compatibility will begin to appear. It is im- 
possible for men who sincerely believe in the 
equal rights of men, to coalesce permanently 
with others whose practice is an habitual in- 
vasion of those rights ; it is impossible for an 
order of society, founded upon the most un- 
limited freedom of labor, to coexist long in 
intimate relations with a society founded upon 
bond or forced labor ; and it is no less impossi- 
ble for political leaders, the breath of whose 
nostrils is popular emancipation and progress, 
to combine with leaders whose life is an utter 
denial of emancipation and progress. 

So long as the South and the North, in the 
earlier periods of national development, looked 
to the same ends — to certain general organizing 
purposes — to a strict construction of the Con- 
stitution — to a denial of the schemes for en- 
larging the federal power — to the independence 
of the States — they were able to act together, 
and the happiest results have been promoted 
by that unity ; but when their mutual solicitude 
for these ends was outgrown — when, in the pro- 
gress of empire, the question arose, whether the 



20 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

social system of the one or the other should 
prevail, to the exclusion, which is unavoidable, 
of its opponent, their friendship grew sultry, 
and a strenuous grapple and fight became im- 
minent. 

If we were called upon, then, to describe the 
political parties of this nation, as they are, or 
as they have been gradually formed, by its 
developing circumstances, we should say that 
they were, 1st, The Pro-slavery, sometimes, 
though unjustly, called the Southern party, 
which is the propagandist of the opinions and 
interests of the small oligarchy — about 60,000 
in all — who hold their fellow-men in bondage ; 
2d, The Democrats, divided into the traditional 
or routine democrats, who masquerade in the 
faded wardrobe of democracy, but care more for 
office than principle, and the real democrats, 
who still retain the inspirations of the Jefierson 
school ; 3d, The Whigs, who are the legitimate 
depositories of federal principles, crossed and 
improved by modern liberalism ; 4th, The Fire- 
eaters, who seem to be opposed to the union 
of the Northern and Southern States under any 
circumstances ; and oth, The Abolitionists, who 



OUR PARTIES AND POLITICS. 21 

are rather a moral than a political combinatioD, 
though a large branch of them are not opposed 
to decided political action. These we shall 
notice briefly in the reverse order in which they 
are named.* 

The Abolitionists and the Fire-eaters, rep- 
resenting the extremes of northern and south- 
ern feeling, have had no little influence on pub- 
lic opinion, but hardly any as yet on the direct 
action of the government. In eloquence, earn- 
estness, and, we suspect, integrity of purpose, 
they are superior to the other parties (the 
Abolitionists, in particular, absorbing some of 
the finest ability of the country, oratorical and 
literary, and a great deal of the noblest aspira- 
tion), but they are both too extravagant in 
opinion, and too violent in procedure, to con- 
ciliate a large and effective alliance. Their de- 
nunciations of the Union, proceeding from con- 

* At the time this was written, the new Kepublican party, 
which is a fusion of the liberal men of all the old parties, on 
the ground of hostility to the spread of slavery, and the 
"■ Know-Nothing party," who, fancying that they have had 
a surfeit of foreigners, are aflaictcd with a kind of political 
indigestion and nausea, were not born. They are referred 
to elsewhere. 



22 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

trary views of its effects, the one condemning 
it because it is supposed to sanction, and the 
other, because it is supposed to interfere with 
slavery, neutralize each other, and lead more 
tranquil minds — minds whose brains are not 
boiling in their skulls — to a conviction that 
they are both alike wrong. The federal Con- 

/^ stitution does not recognize the existence of 
slavery as such, at all, and in no form, except 
indirectly ; nor does it, on the other hand, con- 
fer upon the government any authority for 
meddling with slavery, treating the subject 
wisely as a matter of exclusive state juris- 
diction ; yet the spirit and the letter of that 
instrument are alike instinct with freedom, and 
rightly interpreted, set up an insuperable 
barrier against the extension of any form of 
semtude. The malice of its enemies finds 
food, not in the legitimate operations of the 
organic law, as the framers of it intended it to 
operate, but in those deviations w^iicli the craft 
of politicians has superinduced upon its action, 
in those warpings and torturings of its struc- 
ture, by which it has been made to cover more 

N, than it reaches. 



OUR PAKTIES AND POLITICS. 23 

It is no offense to the ^Vliigs, we trust, for 
indeed it is only repeating the frequent avowals 
of their own leading exponents to say, that as 
a party they are pretty much defunct. What- 
ever uses their organization may have subserved 
in the course of our political history, and no- 
body will deny them some merits, however 
splendid the talent by w^hich their long but 
losing stiiiggle has been illustrated, from the 
day in which their policy was inaugurated by 
Hamilton, until that in which its funeral dis- 
course w^as uttered in "a fine rich brogue," by 
by General Scott, it has neyer succeeded in 
becoming, for more than a year or two at a 
time, a predominant party. It has been able, 
on occasions, to carry its principles into effect, 
but not to the satisfaction of a permanent ma- 
jority. Its distinguishing measures have been, 
on the other hand, repeatedly and unequivocally 
condemned. Not the most sanguine adherent 
can now hope to see them revived. The ques- 
tions of a National Bank, of a Protective Tariff, 
of Internal Improvements, of the Distribution 
of the Public Lands, are adjudicated questions; 
no court exists wherein to bring an appeal ; 



24 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

and the wisest thing, for those who have been 
worsted in the controversy, is to do what the 
most of them have done — submit. Their once 
great and accomplished leaders sleep in honor- 
able graves ; no exigencies of state will ever 
again awaken the solemn eloquence of Webster, 
nor the clarion voice of Clay ever again summon 
his lieges to the battle. The masters are dead, 
and their followers are dispersed or at feud ; or 
should they rally again, it can only be nnder 
other names and for deeper and nobler objects. 
A remnant of the camp of former times, a for- 
lorn hope with Millard Fillmore as the drum- 
major, may strive to keep the old organism 
alive ; but it is clear, in the present aspect of 
affairs, that it cannot possess more than a semi- 
vitality, useless for good and painful to behold. 
We do not say that the theory of politics which 
has hitherto animated the AVhigs is extinct, 
that our people will no more be dazzled by 
visions of strong and splendid governments, nor 
seek to effect by unitary legislation what others 
hope to accomplish by voluntary effort ; on the 
contrary, this tendency is perhaps as strong now 
as ever it w^as ; but what we assert is, that the 



OUR PARTIES AND TOLITICS. 25 

particular measures for which the Whigs have 
been banded together, are obsolete, and the 
party, as a party, utterly without meaning. 

The Democrats of the purer stamp, the real 
Democrats as we have called them, are like the 
Whigs, in a state of comparative dissolution ; 
or rather, they are scattered through their party 
at large, and elsewhere, as leaven through meal, 
without having any effective control in it. 
These democrats still abide by the original 
principles of democracy — represent the popu- 
lar instincts — cling to living ideas of justice, 
and equal rights and progress, and refuse to 
follow their fellows in a iiell-mell abandonment 
of themselves to the seductions of the slave- 
holders. They are not few in number, as we 
are inclined to think, either at the North or the 
South, comprising, as we fain hope, a majority 
of the young men of the nation, yet uncorrupt- 
ed by official contacts, as well as possessing the 
sympathies of many among parties which go by 
other names ; but, having no separate organi- 
zation anywhere, they are sadly overborne by 
the practiced managers of the old organiza- 
tions, who wield the machinery of party action, 
2 



26 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

and consequently of power. In their external 
or immediate pretensions they are not formida- 
ble ; but in the might of their sentiments they 
will capture the future. A steady continuance 
in integrity, a deaf ear turned to the charmings 
of the adders of office, an eagerness to consult, 
amid all the shiftings of policy, the fresh im- 
pulses of the honest young heart of the nation, 
will, ere long,- gather about them the intellect, 
the virtue, and the popular instinct of right, 
which are the redeeming elements of states. 

The other class of Democrats, whom we 
denominate the official or machine-democrats, 
because they move and talk as they are wound 
up, mean as they might be supposed to be, yet 
constitute, in reality, a distinct and powerful 
body. It is not a new remark, we believe, 
that successful parties collect about them 
large squads of speculating politicians, who 
care nothing for truth or righteousness, while 
they have a ravenous appetite for distinc- 
tion and provender. They are not precisely 
camp-followers, because they sometimes fight 
in the ranks, but their interest in contests is 
determined rather by the prospect of booty 



OUR PARTIES AND POLITICS. 27 

than by any convictions they entertain. Like 
Bunyan's By-ends, who followed Religion for 
the silver slippers she w^ore, they are patriots 
because it is profitable to be patriots. In other 
words, they are democrats because the demo- 
crats are generally in the ascendant, which 
means in office. Sometimes they slip round to 
the Whigs, when the Whigs have a sure look 
for success ; but they find it safer, in the long 
run, to be of the other side. No men more 
noisy than they in shouting the usual rallying 
cries, none more glib in the commonplaces of 
electioneering, and none so apparently eaniest 
and sincere. But at heart they are only the 
greediest and shabbiest of scoundrels. It is 
upon their shoulders that incompetent and bad 
men are borne to places of high trust, and from 
them that the Prcctorian guards of republics 
are selected in the hour of their eclipse and 
hastening decay. 

This class of democrats flourishes chiefly in 
those calm times when no great controversy 
agitates the nation, and awakens strong and 
burning passions. In crises which call for lofty 
ambitions and abilities, tliev are of no use ; in 



28 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

fact, they are shriveled and consumed by the 
heat of them, and slink out of the way till the 
fiery storm be past. But they return witli the 
return of public indifference or reaction, when 
there are few who care to watch them, like the 
flies, which a strong wind had blown from their 
carrion. As the reins of power at those times 
are apt to Ml into the hands of little men — 
of a Tyler or a Pierce, for instance — it is the 
golden hour for narrow intellects and base 
hearts. The art of administration at once de- 
generates into mere trickery or management. 
Toads crawl into the seats of the eagles. Public 
policy fluctaates between the awkwardness 
of conscious incompetence and the arro- 
gance of bullyism. The possession of office 
becomes a badge, either of imbecility, or cun- 
ning, or insolence. It is won by services that 
elsewhere would w^arrant a halter, and it is 
conferred, not as the meed of patriotic deserts, 
but as the wages of supple and mercenary ser- 
vice. They who dispense patronage, do so in 
the conviction of Walpole, that every man has 
his price, and they who receive it, take it with 
a full knowledge that the stamp of venality is 



OUR PARTIES AND POLITICS. 29 

on every token of silver. Superiors in place 
are not superiors in merit, only superiors in 
craft and recklesness ; w^liile inferiors don the 
gilt lace and plush of their official varletism 
without a blush on their cheeks, or a sense of 
shame at their hearts. Government, in short, 
is converted into a vast conspiracy of place- 
men, managed by the adroiter villains of the 
set who control elections, dictate legislation, 
defeat reforms, and infuse gradually their 
own muck-worm spirit into the very body of 
the community. The masses, under the para- 
lysis of such a domination, seem to be rendered 
insensible to the usual influences of honor and 
virtuous principle ; are deadened almost to the 
heroic examples of their fathers ; lose the in- 
spiriting traditions of an earlier greatness and 
grandeur of conduct ; and virtually, if not 
actually, sink into slaves. Then, schemers of 
wrong riot in the impunity of licence, and 
projects of wickedness are broached, which, 
a few years before, would have caused a 
shiver of indignation to run through the whole 
land. 

The Pro-Slavery Party, sometimes called the 



30 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

Southern Party, we are unwilling to speak of 
by this name, because we carefully distinguish 
between its southern members, who are the 
propagandists of slavery, and those gentlemen 
of the South who simply wish their peculiar 
domestic system to be let alone ; while we do 
not distinguish between them and their north- 
ern coadjutors — dough-faces are they hight — 
who are their superserviceable instruments. The 
first distinction we make, because we know 
that there are large numbers of intelligent and 
conscientious people at the South who do not 
oelieve that slavery is a good or a finality : on 
the contrary, who feel that it is a burden at 
best — a sad and dreadful inheritance : w4io are 
anxious to manage it wisely, with a view to its 
ultimate extinction ; and, consequently, would 
dread to see it strengthened or extended, 
looking with hope and Christian prayer to the 
day when the combined influences of modern 
Industrialism, and Democracy, and Christianity, 
shall have relieved them of their painful weight 
of responsibility. But we do not make the 
second distinction, because the most efficient, 
and by far the most despicable branch of the 



OUR PARTIES AND POLITICS. 31 

Pro-Slavery Party is that which, educated at 
the North, under all the genial inspirations 
of a free condition of existence, still volun- 
tarily casts itself at the feet of Slavery, 
to eat the dirt of its footmarks, and lick the 
sores on its limbs. For the first class of slave- 
holders, we cherish not only a profound 
sympathy, but a genuine esteem ; we have 
friends amonsr them whose excellences of 
character are themes for meditation and grati- 
tude ; and to the propagators of the system, 
even, we can attribute an entire honesty of 
purpose, though a mistaken one ; but for its 
cringing northern sycophants we have no feel- 
ing but one of unmitigated pity and con- 
tempt. 

This Pro-Slavery Party, which grew mainly 
out of the old republican or democratic party, 
and which has never even taken a distinct name, 
has been the successful party of our history. 
It has achieved a more signal ascendency 
than any other party, and it has done so, 
not by superior ability nor a more illustrious 
virtue, but by dint of its tact, and a compact 
and persistent determination. Its leaders, per- 



32 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

ceiving at an early day that they should play 
a .losing game, if they attempted to stand alone, 
trusting to the ordinary means of success— to 

'the natural supremacy of talent, to the growth 

J 

of numbers, and to the rectitude of their cause 

— hit upon the expedient of identifying them- 
selves with the popular party of the North, 
Having accomplished that, they gradually di- 
rected that party to the defense and spread of 
their peculiar doctrines. Xot satisfied wdth 
the concession, which every intelligent and 
judicious northerner was then glad to make, 
that slavery was a system exclusively with- 
in the control of the States, they first insinu- 
ated and then insisted that slavery w^as not to 
be discussed at all at the North, because a 
moral interference was quite as intolerable 
as a direct political interference. This preten- 
sion, which was just the same as if Eussia or 
Turkey should insist that the principles of ab- 
solutism should not be discussed in the United 
States, because Kussia and Turkey had com- 
mercial treaties with the United States, found 
merchants sordid enough to instigate mobs 
against those who questioned it, and poli- 



OUR PARTIES AND POLITICS. 33 

ticians wicked enough to entrench it behind the 
laws. Yet the taboo of sanctity did not stop 
there, but was drawn around regions in which 
all the States were clearly and equally inter- 
ested — such as the district of Columbia and the 
public lands — while the Post Office, common to 
all, was forbidden to carry " incendiary docu- 
ments," as every argument or appeal against 
the system was called, and petitions to Con- 
gress referring in the remotest manner to it, 
were treated with contumely and disdain. 

This point once reached, it was easy to take a 
bolder stand, and to clamor, with all the vehe- 
mence of partisan heat, for the introduction of 
slavery into those new and virgin territories 
which Providence had opened on our Western 
borders, as we had fondly hoped, for the recep- 
tion of the outcast republicans of Europe, and 
for a new and grander display of the beneficent 
influence of republicanism. And this impudent 
claim — a claim which had no validity in law 
nor sanction in humanity — the pretense that 
a local institution, existing entirely by munici- 
pal usage, and without an iota of validity be- 
yond that — should override all considerations 
2* 



34 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

of justice and policy under a threat of civil 
war, in case of its disallowance — was not 
too much for the forbearance of the North, 
in its ardent devotion to peace and the 
Union ! Ah ! how one submission begets an- 
other, until the chains of a servitude are 
riveted around the necks of the victim ! The 
southern party, thus triumphing in the ter- 
ritories, demanded in the next place, that the 
free States should be made a hunting-ground 
for slaves, that every man of the North should 
be compelled by law to do what no gentleman 
of the South would do for himself, or could 
be, under any circumstances, forced to do for 
others, i. e., put himself on a level with blood- 
hounds, and become a slave-catcher ; and the 
law was passed ! Wresting the power from 
the States, that it might be exercised by Con- 
gress, which was not authorized to exercise it, 
it w^as passed; creating tribunals of justice 
which Congress was not authorized to create ; 
rejecting from its provisions the most sacred 
rights of trial by jury and habeas corpus, this 
law was passed ; imposing unusual and offen- 
sive penalties upon all who should refuse to 



OUR PARTIES AND POLITICS. 35 

take part in its execution, and bribing the offi- 
cers appointed to administer it by offers of higher 
wages in the case of a decision adverse to the 
poor fugitive : this odious and disgraceful law 
was recorded on the statute books of the 
" Model Republic," in the central, the culmi- 
nating year of the nineteenth century. Its 
passage, however, was not the worst feature of 
the transaction ; the craven acceptance vouch- 
safed it by the pulpits and the commercial cir- 
cles ; the pliant ease with which the North 
bent to the insult, was the significant fact in 
the proceeding, which more than all others 
covered many an honest face with shame. 

It is proper to say that one consideration 
prevailed in inducing this ready humiliation : 
the hope of removing the question from the 
sphere of political agitation. We are bound 
to believe, in justice to human nature, that 
the many who welcomed the compromises of 
1850, did so in the sincerest conviction that 
they would put an end to the difficulties be- 
tween the North and South ; and we must 
also confess that it seemed, for a time, as if 
that result were about to be effected. The na- 



36 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

tional conventions of both the great parties ac- 
quiesced in the settlement ; a President was 
chosen whose inaugural address was little more 
than a long proclamation of intended fidelity 
to it ; and Congress came together and acted 
in a more fraternal spirit than had been mani- 
fested for years. Alas ! the uncertainty of mor- 
tal expectations ! In the midst of this apparent 
quietude, a bill, all bristling with outrages and 
dangers, is sprung upon the country. We 
mean, of course, the bill for the organization of 
Nebraska and Kansas territories, whose sole 
object was to repeal the solemn prohibition, 
erected thirty years ago, against the spread of 
slavery into those regions. At a time when 
there was not a citizen legitimately within those 
territories — when no part of the nation, save a 
few intriguers, was dreaming of such a measure ; 
when not a single State, nay, not a single in- 
dividual, had called for it — in the face of the 
most strenuous opposition from Xorth and 
West, this bill was suddenly presented to a Con- 
gress not elected in reference to it, and forced 
to a passage by all the tyrannical arts known 
to legislation, and all the sinister influences 



OUR PARTIES AND POLITICS. 37 

within the reach of an unscrupulous Executive. 
A grosser viohitioQ of all the requirements of 
lionor — of all the safeguards and guarantees of 
republicanism — was seldom perpetrated. 

This we shall show: and in the firsfc place, 
let us remark, that the pretense by which the 
act w^as carried was fraudulent, a falsehood on 
the face of it, and designed only as a popular 
catch for the unreflecting. It purported to 
to give the right of self-government to the peo- 
ple of the territories ; but it did no such thing. 
It denied that right in the most important par- 
ticulars, and mystified it so in others as to ren- 
der it worthless. Nominally conceding the 
" non-intervention" of Congress in the local 
affairs of the territories, it yet intervenes in 
every form in w^hich intervention is possible. 
It imposes the Governor and all other officers 
upon them ; it prescribes unheard of oaths 
to the people ; it restricts the suffi-age ; 
it places in the hands of the President and 
his agents, the powder to mould the future 
character of the community ; and it author- 
izes no legislation wdiich is not subject, di- 
rectly or indirectly, to the control of the fede- 



38 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

ral government. The only non-intervention 
which it establishes, is tlie permission to intro- 
duce slavery into a district where it was before 
forbidden, and the transfer of legislative control, 
hitherto exercised by the representatives of the 
whole people, to a body of judges appointed by 
the Executive. 

Secondly, this claim of absolute sovereignty 
for the people of the territories, is at war with 
our whole policy from the beginning, as well 
as with the most vital principles of just gov- 
ernment. It was never contemplated by the 
framcrs of the Constitution, nor by the people 
of the States who ratified it, that the terri- 
tories acquired under it should be placed upon 
a level with the original States. On the con- 
trary, they were to be held in a state of pupil- 
age, if we may so express it, under the con- 
trol of Congress, until they should have ac- 
quired population and stability enough to man- 
age their affairs for themselves. The idea of 
" squatter sovereignty," that a few accidental 
first-comers should determine the institutions 
of the future State, for all time, was one of the 
most oflensive that could be uttered, and was 



OUR PARTIES AND POLITICS. 39 

unanimously condemned by the great states- 
men of both the North and South. They 
held, that if the whole people paid the expense 
of territorial acquisitions — whether by money or 
blood — if they were taxed for the support of 
their provisional governments ; if they were 
liable for their defense against the aggressions 
of the bordering savages — then the whole 
people had also a right to a voice in their 
management. Taxation and representation 
must go together, said the Democracy; and 
this principle, we attest, is an older and bet- 
ter one than the miserable subterfuge of " non- 
intervention," by which the demagogues of 
Congress hope to supplant it. "Non-inter- 
vention !" forsooth, which means that the peo- 
ple of the States shall bear all the burdens of the 
territories, but have no power to protect them 
from the passage of injurious and infamous 
laws. It means that the parent must be re- 
sponsible for all the debts and deeds of his 
child, and yet be divested of all the authority 
of a parent. It means, in short, that the per- 
petrators of the iniquity wanted some delu- 
sive pretext, and that " non-intervention," 



40 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

with all its absurdities, was the best they could 
find. 

Again : this bill in the method of its passage, 
nullified another fundamental principle of rep- 
resentative government, namely, that a repre- 
sentative is but the mouth-piece and organ of 
his constituents. Does anybody believe that, 
if the 2:)roposal to repeal the Missouri Compro- 
mise had been submitted to a direct vote of 
the peoj^le, that it would have commanded 
anywhere, north of Mason's and Dixon's line, a 
single majority in any district or township in 
any State ? Was there a solitary petition for 
it sent in from either North or South ? Was a 
single member of Congress, who voted for it, 
elected, with a view to such a question ? Were 
not the tables of both Senate and House 
laden with remonstrances against it, forward- 
ed not by politicians, nor enthusiasts, but 
by the most sober and conservative citizens? 
Did its friends, when challenged to do so, dare 
to postpone action upon it, for another year, 
until the people should be allowed to pass up- 
on it ? Was it suffered to take its regu- 
lar course in the progress of legislation ? No ! 



OUR PARTIES AND POLITICS. 41 

— no ! — no ! And yet we are told that ours 
is a representative government ! A number 
of men, delegated for particular purposes to 
"Washington, possessing not a particle of au- 
thority beyond that conferred upon them by 
the people, neglect the objects for which they 
were chosen, and proceed to accomplish other 
objects, which are not only not wished by their 
constituents, but are an outrage upon their sin- 
cerest and deepest convictions. Can we call them 
representatives ? or, are they not rather usurp- 
ers, recreants, oligarchs, despots ? What use 
is there in popular elections, when the per- 
sons chosen fancy themselves exempted from 
all responsibility, and go on to act in the 
most independent and arbitraiy manner ? It is 
true, they may be dismissed afterwards for their 
criminal breach of trust, as the barn-door may 
be locked after the horse is stolen ; but then 
the mischief is already done. We may dis- 
charjje a clerk who robs the till ; but will that 
restore us our money? We may punish a se- 
ducer when he is caught ; but is that a recom- 
pense to our violated honor ? Not at all. 
What we want in legislation, as in other trusts, 



42 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

are honest fiduciaries: men who will perform 
their duties according to our wishes, and not 
in pursuance of their own selfish objects; men 
who do not require to be watched at every 
step, and whose fidelity does not depend alone 
upon our ulterior privilege of breaking them 
when they have done wrong. A Congress of 
such men would be little better than an assem- 
blage of cheats, and, for our parts, we should 
greatly prefer the rule of Nicholas, or Louis 
Napoleon, to their heterogeneous frauds and 
oppressions. 

An open disregard of the will of the con- 
stituency is always a grave offense in a popular 
government, but how flagrant and unpardon- 
able is it, when it is committed in furtherance 
of measures which look to the overthrow of 
popular liberty ? Had the Nebraska bill been 
comparatively unexceptionable, had it contem- 
plated some great and useful improvement or 
reform, there would even then have existed no 
excuse ibr the haste, the violence, and the 
audacity with which it was pressed to a vote ; 
but when we reflect that its principal object 
was, to repeal a salutary ordinance against 



OUR PARTIES AND POLITICS. 43 

the diffusion of a lamentable evil, we 
search in vain for words to express our 
feeling of the magnitude and malignity of 
the wrong. For nearly half a century those 
fertile regions of the West had rejoiced 
in their prospective exemption from the 
outrages of slavery. The American, and 
the foreigner, even, who rode over them, felt 
his heart dilate as he beheld in their rich 
fields the future home of an advancing and 
splendid civilization. He could already hear, 
in the rustle of the grasses, the hum of a pros- 
perous industry ; he saw magnificent cities rise 
on the borders of the streams, and pleasant 
villages dot the hills, and a flourishing com- 
merce whiten the ripples of the lakes ; the 
laugh of happy children came up to him from 
the corn-fields, and as the glow of the evening 
sun tinged the distant plains, a radiant and 
kindling vision floated upon its beams, of mjTi- 
ads of men, escaped from the tyrannies of the 
Old World, and gathered there in worshiping 
circles, to pour out their grateful hearts to 
God, for a redeemed and teeming earth. But, 
woe unto us now, this beautiful region, com- 



44 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

pared with which the largest principalities of 
Europe are but pin-folds, nay, compared with 
which tlie most powerful existing empires are 
of trivial extent, is opened to the blight, the 
hopelessness, the desolation of a form of socie- 
ty which can never advance beyond a semi- 
barbarism, or whose highest achievement is a 
purchase of the wealth and freedom of one 
race, by the eternal subjection of another. 
Our vision of peaceful groups of free laborers 
is changed into the contemplation of black 
gangs of slaves. A single act of legislation, 
like Satan, when he entered Paradise, has re- 
versed the destinies of a world. The fields 
seem to wither at its approach ; the waters dry 
up ; threatening clouds obscure the sky ; and 

" Nature, through all her works, gives sigus of woe, 
That all is lost." 

It has been esteemed the special privilege 
and glory of this young republic that her future 
was in her own hands. Born to no inheritance 
of wrong and sorrow, like the nations of the 
older continent, and with an existence as fresh 
and unsullied as the fame of a ripening maid- 



OUR PARTIES AND POLITICS. 45 

en, it was supposed that she might see the 
states, which were soon to become the chil- 
dren of her family, growing up about her in 
prosperity, love, and vigor. She could watch 
over their cradles and keep them from harm ; 
she could nourish them into manly strength ; 
she could form them, by her wise and tender so- 
licitude, to a career of exalted worth and great- 
ness. A new page in the history of mankind 
appeared to be opened — a page unblotted by 
the blood-stains of tyranny, which mark the 
rubrics of the past, and destined to be written 
over only by the records of an ever-maturing 
nobleness and grandeur. This was the am- 
bition of her fathers — of those who laid the 
beams of her habitation deep in the principles 
of virtuous freedom, and bequeathed to her the 
heroic precedent of single-hearted devotion to 
justice and right. But, alas, how are their 
hopes prostrated ! Ere the first half century 
of her youth is passed, she finds herself not en- 
gaged in a hand-to-hand struggle for the pre- 
servation of her paternal acres, her unshorn 
and boundless prairies, from slavery, but yield- 
ing them, almost without reluctance, to the 



46 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

fatal blight. When Kiobe saw her fair sons and 
daughters falling under the swift darts of the 
angry gods, she wept herself to stone ; but the 
genius of America — whom it is the pride of her 
sculptors to represent as wearing the Phrygian 
cap of liberty on her brow, and trampling upon 
broken chains with her feet, and bearing aloft 
the aegis of eternal justice — surrenders her 
children, without remorse, to death. She be- 
lies her symbols, she suppresses her inspira- 
tions ; she opens the gates of the coming cen- 
turies to the advent of a remediless bondage 

We are aware, it is often said, that slavery 
cannot be carried into the territories recently 
organized — that their soil and climate are not 
adapted to its support, and that the sole aim, in 
removing the restriction of the Missouri compro- 
mise, is to erase a distinction which the South 
regards as dishonoring, and unjust. It has, 
however, been sufficiently answered to this, 
that slavery thrives in Missouri, which is be- 
tween nearly the same parallels of latitude, 
that Illinois, similarly situated, was only saved 
from it by a protracted and earnest struggle, 
and Indiana only by the immortal ordinance of 



OUK PARTIES AND POLITICS. 47 

1787. But it is useless to adduce precedents 
and analogies in the face of current facts. The 
moment in which we write witnesses the pro- 
ceedings of assemblages convened to keep free- 
emigration out of these territories by force of 
arms, if need be. Already slaveholders are 
on their way to establish themselves and their 
"institution" there, nay, they are already in 
possession of some of the choicest parts of the 
soil, and are resolved to maintain it, against all 
comers. Away, then, with the flimsy pretext 
that slavery is banned by what Mr. Webster 
called " the laws of God ;" by natural position 
and circumstances ! These, we admit, have 
much to do wath the prevalence and strength 
of the system, but they are not omnipotent 
nor final — they are only accessory, either for 
it or against it ; and the will of man — his de- 
termination to abide by the perennial princi- 
ples of right, or to surrender them to a tempo- 
rary and short-sighted spirit of gain — is what 
gives character, in this respect, to society. 
Nebraska and Kansas will be slave states if 
slaveholders go there, and they will be free 
states if freemen go there, and this is the long 



48 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

and short of the matter, let the soil woo and 
the climate smile encouragement upon whom it 
pleases. If the American people do not now, 
on the instant, rescue those lands to freedom, 
it is in vain that they will hereafter look to 
nature or any other influences for their salva- 
tion. 

We are, indeed, so far from being persuaded 
that it is not meant to take slavery into our 
new territories, that we begin to entertain the 
conviction, that the propagandists of the South 
will not stop even with the territories. It is 
imputed to them by authorities entitled to re- 
spect, that they cherish a policy which aims, 
not merely at its establishment within the lim- 
its of all the new states, but at the consolidation 
of it, by foreign conquests. We know that a 
movement has long been on foot in California 
for its legalization there ; we know that Texas is 
considered as the nucleus of three or four slave- 
holding sovereignties ; we know that schemes, 
open and secret, are prosecuted for the accpii- 
sition of Cuba, before Cuba shall have eman- 
cipated her blacks, as it is alleged she intends 
to do ; we know that eager, grasping eyes are 



OUR PARTIES AND POLITICS. 49 

set on Mexico ; we know that a Senator has 
called for the withdrawal of our naval squad- 
ron from the coast of Africa, that the slave- 
trade may be pursued in greater safety ; we 
know that another Senator has broached the 
recognition of the Dominican Republic, with an 
ulterior view to its annexation; and we are 
told, that overtures have been made to Brazil, 
for cooperation in the ultimate establishment 
of a vast slaveholding confederacy to the 
South. Of course, some of these designs are 
still in the bud ; they are not participated 
in by the judicious men of any section; but 
the remote conception of them should be moni- 
tory and waken us to vigilance. It is one of 
the dangers as well as glories of this nation, 
that its plans are executed with the rapidity of 
magnetism. A thought is scarcely a thought 
before it becomes a deed. We scorn delays ; 
we strike and parley afterwards ; we actualize 
the dreams of the old philosophers, and impart 
to our abstract ideas an instant creative ener- 
gy. The fact, then, that such comprehensive 
schemes of pro-slavery expansion gain admit- 
tance into active minds, nay, that they are said 



50 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

to burrow in those of men of eminent station, 
should beget a timely and jealous watchfulness 
against their least beginnings. 

It is one of the arrangements of Providence, 
by whicli it tests the reality of our virtue, and 
punishes the want of it, that w^e should be so 
insensible to joint or coi'porate responsibilities, 
and yet so intimately connected with the tre- 
mendous good or evil consequences of their 
infringement. We are apt to suppose that the 
oflenses of nations, against the laws of integrity 
and right, can be laid to no man's charge, 
or, rather, that the criminality of them is dis- 
sipated, through the multitude of the offend- 
ers, and we do not feel, in consenting or con- 
tributing to the commission of them, that we 
contract any degree of personal guilt. On 
tlie contrary, we undervalue them as offenses, 
and even laugh at the thought of national 
sins, as if they were chimeras, or the bodiless 
and impalpable acts of one, w4io, as the 
adage expresses it, has neither a body to be 
kicked nor a soul to damn. But, measured by 
their actual effects, by the awful reach and 
deathless vitality of their w^orkings, these 



OUR PARTIES AND POLITICS. 51 

national iniquities are they which are most to 
be struggled against, deprecated, dreaded. The 
evil done by a private individual spreads 
through a narrow circle only, and does not 
always live after him ; the contagion of its virus 
may be speedily counteracted, and the worst 
results of it often are no more than the debase- 
ment of a few other individuals. But the evil 
done by the public man, whicli is sanctioned 
by a corporate authority, which gets embodied 
into a wicked law, and to that extent be- 
comes the deed of many, is augmented and mul- 
tiplied, both in its criminality and consequences, 
by the number of wills which may be supposed 
to have concurred in its commission. Its 
powers of mischief are infinitely increased ; the 
potent enginery of the state is made its instru- 
ment ; its blasting influences spread, not only 
through a single community, but over vast 
races, and travel downward to the remotest 
time. It may arrest the movements of nations, 
paralyze the very fertility of the earth, and stun 
the heart of humanity for ages. The vices of sin- 
gle men are the diseases by which they themselves 
suffer and are broken, or at most by which they 



52 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

communicate disease to those who come in con- 
tact with them ; but the vices of states are a 
malana which blisters in the air and festers in 
the soil, and sweeps away millions to the tomb. 
Oh ! how much of good may be done, or of 
evil prevented, by a little timely legislation. 
When Tiberius G-racchus, traveling through 
Italy, to join the army in Spain, saw how the 
multitude of his countiymen were impoverished 
and their fields laid desolate by the existence 
of slavery, he proposed to terminate its evils, 
and scatter the clouds of disaster that had 
already begun to gather and brood over the 
destinies of the Roman commonwealth, by a 
simple, just, and practicable law which should 
build up, in the midst of the luxurious Roman 
nobles and their debased slaves, an independent 
Roman yeomanry. He perceived that the pub- 
lic domain, long usurped by the Patricians, if 
appropriated to the people, would prevent the 
concentration of wealth, and stimulate the pride 
and industrial energies of the almost hopeless 
people ; and, had his project been carried, he 
would have aiTested the downward career of 
his couiftry, and perpetuated for centuries, 



OUR PARTIES AND POLITICS. 53 

doubtless, the early Roman virtue, wliicli still 
seems marvelous to us in its dignity and force. 
But the designs of Gracchus were defeated by 
his murder ; the Patricians triumphed ; the 
people grew poorer and corrupter, till they 
w^ere at last fed like paupers from the public 
granaries ; alternate insurrections of slaves 
swept the state like a whirlwind ; despots like 
Sylla, and demagogues like Marius, convulsed 
society by civil wars ; and, finally, the tyrant 
Ccesar arose to reap the harvest 6f previous dis- 
tractions, and, as the only salvation from pro- 
founder miseries, to erect on the ruins of the 
Republic an irresponsible monarchy.* 

We have dwelt upon the proceedings of the 
pro-slavery party so long, that we have left 
ourselves little space for urging upon other 
parties their duties in the crisis. But we will not 
speak to them as parties. We will say to them 
as Americans, as freemen, as Christians, that 

* This historical allusion, suggested to the writer by a 
perusal of Michelet's Romaa Republic, has occurred also to 
Mr. Bancroft in his splendid essay on Slavery as the cause 
of the downfall of the Roman Republic. See Bancroft's 
Miscellanies, page 280, " On the Decline of the Roman 
People." 



54 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

the time has arrived when all divisions and 
animosities should be laid aside, in order to 
to rescue this great, this beautiful, this glorious 
land from a hateful domination. As it now is, 
no man who expresses, however moderately, a 
free opinion of the slave-system of the South, 
is allowed to hold any office of profit or trust 
under the General Grovernment. No man can 
be President, no man a foreign minister, no 
man a tide-waiter, even, or the meanest scul- 
lion in the federal kitchen, w^ho has not first 
bowed dowm and eaten the dirt of adherence to 
slavery. Oh ! shameless debasement — that under 
a Union formed for the establishment of liberty 
and justice — under a Union born of the agonies 
and cemented by the blood of our parents — a 
Union whose mission it was to set an example 
of republican freedom, and commend it to the 
panting nations of tlie world — we freemen of 
the United States should be suffocated by poli- 
ticians into a silent aquiescence with despotism ! 
That we should not dare to utter the words or 
breathe the aspirations of our fathers, or pro- 
pagate their principles, on pain of ostracism 
and political death ! Just Heaven ! into 



OUR PARTIES AND POLITICS. 55 

what depths of infamy and insensibility have 
we fallen ! 

We repeat, that until the sentiment of slavery 
is driven back to its original bounds, to the 
states to which it legitimately belongs, the peo- 
ple of the North are vassals. Yet their emanci- 
pation is practicable, if not easy. They have 
only to e\'ince a determination to be free, and 
they are free. They are to discard all past 
alliances, to put aside all present fears, to dread 
no future coalitions, in the single hope of car- 
rying to speedy victory a banner inscribed with 
these devices : — The Repeal of the Fugitive 
Slave Law — The Restoratiox of the Mis- 
souri Compromise — No More Slave States 
— No MORE Slave Territories — The Ho:\ie- 
stead for Free Men ox the PublicLaxds. 
■September, 1854. 



It is proper to add, to render the \dews of 
this article complete, that the multiplied out- 
rages and aggressions of the Slavery Party, have 
compelled a fusion of the more honest and con- 
scientious adherents of the old parties, into a 
new party called the Republican, which has not 



56 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

adopted the standard of principles we have re- 
commended in the last j)aragraph, but satisfied 
itself with the simple de\ice of no more Slave 
Territories and no more Slave States. That is 
sufficient — and the standard-bearer who has 
been selected to conduct its fortunes, during the 
next presidential campaign, is Fremont, the ad- 
venturous Pathfinder of the Rocky Mountains, 
and the gallant conqueror and liberator of Cali- 
fornia. 
July, 1856. 



THE VESTIGES OF DESPOTISM.* 

We remember, in crossing the British Chan- 
nel once, that we had taken with us an odd 
number of Punch, to while away the tedious- 
ness of the passage. On landing at Boulogne, 
it was crammed into a side pocket for safety, 
but the gendarme, who inspected travelers' 
luggage, seeing the paper, tore it into a thou- 
sand pieces before our face, looking as fierce as 
a pandoor all the time, and repeating, " 11 est 
dcfeiidu, monsieur r It seemed that Punch had 
been in the habit of drawing a small man with 
a big nose, which Louis Napoleon took for him- 
self — this was before he and Victoria shook 
hands and kissed — and he avenged the indig- 
nity by excluding Fiinch from the republic. 
Again, subsequently, on entering Vienna, we 
had a London Morning Chronicle sequestered ill 

* It is proper to remark, in order to explain some allu- 
sions at the close, that this article -was suggested by the 
violent abuse which followed upon the publication of the 
foregoing article, in Putnam's Magazine. 
3* 



58 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

the same manner because it contained some 
account of the progress of Kossuth in the Uni- 
ted States ; and a friend of ours, not long after, 
crossing the Po, from Austrian Italy into the 
Estates of the Church, had his Bible taken 
away, though copies of Voltaire's naughty 
Candide, and Byron's naughtier Don Juan, 
were left untouched in his carpet-bag. 

These were specimens of European despot- 
ism, and we thanked God that no such petty 
interferences with the rights of men were per- 
mitted in our own dear land beyond the sea. 
A man, we said to ourselves proudly, may read 
what he pleases there, never saying, " by your 
leave," to any emperor, priest, or catchpoll of 
them all. The press is free, opinion is free, lo- 
comotion is free ; and the wayfarer, though a 
stranger, may think his own thoughts, say his 
own say, and be happy or miserable, as he 
likes, without let or molestation from his neigh- 
bors or the government. Hail Columbia ! we 
exclaimed, in a fit of patriotic enthusiasm; 
home of the exile, asylum of the oppressed, re- 
fuge of the gagged and persecuted, etc., etc., 
etc. " Where the free spirit of mankind, at 



THE VESTIGES OF DESPOTISM. 59 

length, throws its last fetters oft';" where a 
boundless field is open for every seed of truth 
to germinate;' w^iere an unlimited career is 
proffered to the excursions of the mind ; where 
no tyrant, no creed, no church lays its heavy 
interdict upon the growth of human thought ; 
Hail, thou latest born of time ; mighty in thy 
youth ; chainless and unchained ; " gleaming 
in the blaze of sunrise when earth is wrapped 
in gloom." Oh, mayest thou long be proud 
and worthy of thy glorious dower! 

But calmer reflection taught us to inquire, 
after a time, whether our patriotism, taking 
the bit in its mouth, had not been running 
away with our reason. Is it true, w^e asked, that 
there is no despotism in America? Have we 
no authorities, which take the control of opin- 
ion, and assume to be infallible ? Are there no 
institutions, no tribunals, no self-constituted 
judges, which impose injurious restraints upon 
the freedom of thought ? Have we extinguish- 
ed the spirit and habit of persecution along 
with its outward symbols — the rack, the stake, 
the dungeon and the prison-house? We an- 
swered ourselves in this w^ise : We do not, it 



60 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

must be confessed, resort to the same compul- 
sory methods against the human understanding 
as obtained in former ages, and still obtain, 
in some countries. We do not stretch the 
limbs of men on instruments of torture, be- 
cause they refuse to conform to this or that 
standard of incomprehensible dogmas ; we do 
not pillory our poor De Foes, for the crime 
of writing candidly on public aftairs, nor im- 
prison our humble Bunyans for proclaiming 
the gospel in the streets ; w^e do not bury our 
statesmen under the sea as they do in Naples ; 
we do not banish our most illustrious artists 
and poets, because they are liberals, to the wald 
swamps of Cayenne, as they do in France : all 
this must be confessed, and it must be con- 
fessed, too, that these are noble advantages to 
have achieved over the spirit of intolerance. 
No one can over-estimate their w^orth and glory. 
They are priceless victories won from the old 
empire of darkness. They lift us into a secu- 
rity and elevation which baffle for ever the 
malice of a whole infernal brood of serpents, 
who may now hiss about the rock of our re- 
treat, but cannot sting us to death. 



THE VESTIGES OF DESPOTISM. 61 

Yet it appears upon minuter consideration,that 
if the advanced civilization of our country rejects 
the grosser applications of force by which opin- 
ion was wont to be controlled, there are others 
which are 'not entirely discontinued. A less 
barbarous, a more refined tyranny is compatible 
with this general sense of propriety and justice. 
There are chains which men forge for their fel- 
lows, that fret and cut their souls, if they do 
not canker their bodies. There are inquisitions 
of obloquy and hatred which may succeed to 
inquisitions of the fligot and flame. There is 
a moral Coventry almost as humiliating and op- 
pressive as the stern solitude of the dungeon. 
The spirit of bigotry may survive the destruc- 
tion of its carnal weapons ; despotism may re- 
tain its instincts, and give vigorous signs of 
vitality, long after the sword shall have been 
wrenched from its grasp ; and the fires of hell 
may burn in the eyes of bigotry when they have 
already ceased to burn upon its altars. For 
what is the essential and distinctive characteris- 
tic of despotism ? Not its outward instruments, 
— its Bastiles, its gibbets, its bayonets, its 
knouts, and its thumb-screws — but its animat- 



62 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

ing purpose. It is the disposition to suppress 
the free formation and publication of opinion, 
by other means than those by which the mind 
is logically moved — by other influences than 
motives addressed to the understanding, the 
reason, and the better feelings of the heart. 
Wherever a man's bread is taken away because 
he votes with this party or that, wherever he 
is denounced to public odium because of the 
heterodoxy of his honest sentiments, wherever 
moral turpitude is imputed to him on account 
of his speculative errors, wherever he is in ter- 
ror of the mob on any account, wherever the 
inveteracy of public prejudice compels him to 
remain silent altogether, or to live a life of per- 
petual hypocrisy, wherever his sincere convic- 
tions can not be disclosed and promulged for 
fear of personal discomfiture and annoyance, 
wherever even a limit is fixed to the progress 
of research, there despotism flourishes, with 
more or less strength, and only needs the con- 
currence of circumstances to be nursed into 

\ muscular violence and fury. 

V Now, as w^e have said, it seems to us that, 
tried by this test, we have despotisms in the 



THE VESTIGES OF DESPOTISM. 63 

United States, just as they have elsewhere, and, 
that with all our advances in liberality of w^hich 
we justly boast, we come short in practice of 
the brilliant ideal of our institutions. We have 
not attained to a genuine and universal liberty 
— (we will not say tolerance^ because that word 
is borrowed from an age when freedom was sup- 
posed to be a boon and not a right) — and we 
fail not in one or two, but in many respects. 
In the Church, in the State, in the popular 
meeting, and in the more private relations of 
society, we often surround ourselves with need- 
less barriers, we build walls of separation be- 
tween ourselves and the great realms of intelli- 
gence yet unexplored, and w^e paralyze those 
intellectual energies which are our only instru- 
ments for exploring them, the only tools for 
working the golden mines of truth. 

In the first place, we cannot but consider a 
large number of our ecclesiastical organizations 
as so ijiany restraints upon the freedom of the 
mind. Founded upon creeds which admit of 
no possibility of truth beyond their own for- 
mulas, they discourage inquiry in the largest 
and most important domains of thought. Kant, 



64 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

the great German philosopher, in one of his 
valuable minor writings, discussing the ques- 
tion whether any association is justified in bind- 
ing itself to certain immutable articles of faith, 
in order to exercise a perpetual and supreme 
guardianship over its members, and indirectly- 
through them over the people, contends that a 
compact of this kind, entered into, not as a sim- 
ple bond of union for the interchange of com- 
mon sentiments, but with a view to conclude 
the human race from further enlightenment, is a 
crime against humanity, whose highest destina- 
tion consists emphatically in intellectual pro- 
gress. " A combination," says he, *' to main- 
tain an unalterable religious system, which no 
man is permitted to call in doubt, would, even 
for the term of one man's life, be wholly intoler- 
able. It would be, as it were, to blot out 
one generation in the progress of the human 
species towards a better condition ; to render 
it barren and hence noxious to posterity." This 
conduct, in the religious world, proceeds upon 
the assumption that our knowledge of divine 
things cannot advance like our knowledge of 
natural things ; that the first investigators of 



THE VESTIGES OF DESPOTISM. 66 

the Scriptures exhausted their contents, and 
that nothinij is left for those that come after 
them, but, as Johnson says of the followers of 
Shakespeare, to new-name their characters and 
repeat their phrases. But does this view do 
justice to the sacred word ? Granting that its 
leading principles may be easily discerned — a 
thing difficult to grant in the face of two hun- 
dred conflicting sects, each of which finds its 
support and nutriment in the same pages ; for, 
as Sir William Hamilton is fond of quoting, 

" This is the book where each his dogma seeks, 
And this the book where each his dogma finds," * 

— we must still suppose, that a revelation from 
the Infinite will contain infinite resources of 
truth. Neither its alleged origin, which is from 
the perfect God, nor its alleged destiny, which 
is the final redemption of mankind from error, 
will allow us for a moment to treat it as an or- 
dinary message, soon told, and as speedily com- 
prehended. It must conceal inexhaustible 
riches, or not be what it purports ; while to 
suppose it to be what it purports, and yet to 

* " Hie liber est in quo quoerit sua dogmata quisque, 
luvenit, et pariter dogmata quisque sua." 



66 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

attempt to inclose its treasures in the frail and 
ricketty caskets of words which men devise, is 
an enterprise for pouring the ocean into a 
quart-pot, or for bottling the air of the whole 
heavens in one's private cellar. Nor is the at- 
tempt less pernicious than it is absurd : for it 
erects each little consistory into a separate 
popedom, issuing its inflillible decrees and de- 
nouncing its interdicts with all the arrogance 
of its Roman prototype. As an inevitable con- 
secpience, two things result ; firstly, that the 
supieme control of the religious sentiment of 
nations falls into the hands of the priesthood, 
who are conservative by position and training, 
— and, secondly, that the energies of the 
churches are absorbed in controversy or secta- 
rian propagation, at the expense of a free and 
earnest inquiry after new truth, and the culture 
of the more genial and hopeful feelings. The 
history of our American sects, for instance, is 
an almost unbroken record of tierce and bigoted 
disputes. New England has been a kind of 
theological Golgotha, and the fields are covered 
with battered skulls. The clergy have been 
the ruling powers there, and the people have 



THE VESTIGES OF DESPOTISM. 67 

dared to laugh only with the consent of the 
deacons. We are aware that this aspect of 
things has materially changed of late years; 
we know, also, what inappreciable services the 
churches have otherwise rendered to society ; 
but we must not forget, in the midst of our 
ready gratitude for these, how many of them, 
by means of their creeds, and the terrors of 
their forms and excommunications, still hang 
as an incubus upon the minds and consciences 
of their adherents. Nor upon them alone, but 
upon many others — even upon those who do 
not professedly wear their colors. They too 
often terrify the ardent reformer, whose bright 
hopes they change by the magic of fear into 
dread spectres ; they too often arrest the up- 
lifted arm of science when it would strike from 
the rock, or open out from the bowels of the 
earth, some precious fountain of use ; — and they 
too often array themselves on the side of eftete 
traditions and mouldy abuses, when they should 
be pressing forward under the ever-living in- 
spirations of hope and freedom. 

It is said that Justinian, when he had 
completed the compilation of his Institutes, 



68 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

issued a decree that no comment should be 
written upon them, which aimed at more 
than a sketch of their contents, or a tran- 
scription of their titles ; and it is true of 
most sects that they try to copy this im- 
perial and arbitrary example. They impose 
on others, as exclusively right and authori- 
tative, their own slender selections out of the 
vast complexity of truths — the few pearls they 
have fished out of the measureless sea — fancying 
that they have banished error, when they have 
only extinguished the independence of thought. 
Indeed, it is scarcely too much to attest, ap- 
propriating the figure of Mirabeau, where he 
compares truth to the statue of Isis covered by 
many veils, that they teach their followers to 
lift a single one, whilst they fling their clubs 
and battleaxes at the heads of all who would 
remove the others. " Froculy oh ! p-ocul, esti 
Ijrofani!^' rings the chorus, and the poor auda- 
cious " infidel" — as every dissentient is sure to 
be called — is handed over to an everlasting 
contempt. Now, what chance truth has in 
such a hubbub it is needless to inquire. 

We recognize, secondly, an oppressive exer- 



THE VESTIGES OF DESPOTISM. 69 

cise of despotic power, in the conduct of 
political parties, both in respect to the 
violence, and bitterness of their hatreds, and 
the relentless proscriptions which crown their 
victories. The former are, perhaps, not to be 
avoided in the present imperfect state of en- 
lightenment and Christianity; but the second 
are wholly indefensible anywhere, and especially 
in a republican society. The primary, essen- 
tial, distinctive right of man, in a free state, 
which rests upon popular choice, is the right 
of election, and to assail that right, by direct or 
indirect means, by force of arms or by the ab- 
straction from one of his subsistence, is treason 
against the fundamental principles of demo- 
cracy — it is a Use-majeste done to the people. 
Yet, all our political parties justify themselves 
in a wholesale political slaughter of their op- 
ponents, whenever they come into power. Like 
those tribes in Africa, which sacrifice a hundred 
or two of men every time a new prince ascends 
the throne, though they confine the immola- 
tion to the leaders only of their enemies, our 
whigs and democrats, on the occasion of their 
advents to power, butcher all the opposing 



70 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

chiefs, and all the subordinate functionaries, 
down to the drill-sergeant and the sutler. And, 
like William the Norman, when he conquered 
England, they distribute all the lands and mes- 
suages of the vanquished to their owm set. A 
regular Domesday-book is opened, and the fiefs 
and holdings are parceled out with a coolness 
of effrontery, which almost persuades us that 
the perpetrators of the outrage are unconscious 
of its monstrous meanness. 

This is an injustice which, however, works the 
usual effects of despotism. It degrades the char- 
acter of all who are concerned in it; reducing 
political life into the sheerest scramble for 
spoils, and bringing the suspicion of mercenari- 
ness upon every man who takes office. In 
either aspect, the practice is signally disastrous. 
By debasing the standard of official eligibility, 
it places in high position men of corrupting 
and pernicious example, and, by relaxing the 
tone of public controversy, it saps and under- 
mines the integrity of the people. No service 
which government renders to society is more 
important than its influence in preserving a 
sense of the general good as superior to in- 



THE VESTIGES OF DESPOTISM. 71 

dividual interests. Indeed, this may be re- 
garded as one of its finest functions — the educa- 
tion of the masses into a perception of the 
supremacy of the general over particular ends. 
Our natural impulses, our family ties, our 
necessities of business, tend towards the de- 
velopment of a comparatively selfish egotism, 
which our participation in public affairs tends 
to counteract. But, if that participation, in- 
stead of being animated by a sense of devotion 
to the public good, is converted into an intense 
struggle for the accomplishment of individual 
purposes, we lose one of the most salutary 
restraints, one of the noblest inspirations of 
the civilized state. We resolve society into 
what Hobbs contended was its original con- 
dition — a state of war. We confirm the mul- 
titude in their narrow and low ambitions ; and 
we restrict their actions to the petty circle of 
their own private and individual concerns. 

Again ; the examples of really great states- 
men are among the most precious and inde- 
structible inheritances of a nation. No matter 
how ffreat their services in avertiuG: dano'crs 
from the commonwealth, or in achieving ad- 



72 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

vantages for it, by the direct exercise of their 
faculties, these cannot be compared with their 
indirect utility, in presenting to the people a 
high, manly, dignified, and heroic ideal of de- 
votion to the public weal. Their life-long ab- 
negation of self, their cautious wisdom, their 
moderation of temper, the spectacle of their 
constant preference of a broad and ultimate good 
to local expedients and temporary triumphs, 
habituate the general mind to the contemphition 
of lofty ends and models of excellence in con- 
duct. Who can doubt that the characters of 
Washington, of Franklin, of Marshall, of 
Madison, etc., have been infinitely more valu- 
able to us Americans than any battles they may 
have won in the field, or the forum V They 
have been so, because they have filled 
our histories with pictures of a disinter- 
ested virtue. But such characters are not 
possible in public life, when that life is no 
longer a contest of great minds for great ends, 
but a pot-house squabble — when the despotism 
of party machinery excludes from public ser- 
vice every man who is not suflfiiciently base to 
stoop to its arts, and to roll in its ordure. Do 



THE VESTIGES OF DESPOTISM. 73 

we not, by our party intolerance, then by the 
proscriptions which tread upon the heels of 
every success, rob the community of a twofold 
guaranty of its progress, of the services of its 
best men, and of a high moral tone of public 
sentiment? 

But this leads us to the third species of des- 
potism which we think it important to note, 
and which, instigated by the bad examples of 
both church and state, may be described as that 
of popular opinion. We do not agree with 
those foreign writers who represent the tyranny 
of the majority in this country as absolutely 
terrific : they have exaggerated its effects; yet 
their criticisms are not without a tincture of 
truth. Compared with the older nations, there 
is a larger freedom of opinion on most subjects 
in this country, than anywhere else on the 
globe ; but, compared with our own standards, 
or the ideals of our institutions, we are on mani- 
fold subjects lamentably deficient. It is natural, 
in a society whose stability depends as much 
upon opinion as upon law, and more upon 
opinion than force, that opinion, like other 

powers, should occasionally play the despot. 
4 



74 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

What we complain of, however, is not the 
habitual watchfulness of the public mind over 
public interests, and its chronic tendency to 
rectify abuses, or to avert evil by an instant 
insurrection, but the excessive resentment of 
it when provoked. It is that unwillingness to 
be corrected which makes its thought rather a 
prejudice than an opinion — that tenacity with 
which it clings to its customary formulas — 
and the severity with which it often resists even 
the slightest departures from them. We com- 
plain of it because it erects the majority into 
an idol, a monarch, a tyrant, and begets a defer- 
ence to it which is almost as bad as any savage 
superstition or loyal sycophancy. It weakens 
the very springs of character in men, and then 
lords it over their weakness with an irresponsi- 
ble violence and outrage. Take, for instance, 
the pro-slavery sentiment of this country, as it 
prevailed a few years ago — how arbitrary, 
ferocious, and overwhelming it was ! Not 
merely in the South, where the vast interests 
involved, and the peace and security of society 
itself justify an extraordinary sensitiveness 
towards all impertinent interference, but 



THE VESTIGES OF DESPOTISM. 75 

throughout the nation, where no such exigen- x 
cies of danger can be alleged. In the most 
secluded districts of New England, even, where 
a black slave was never seen, and thousands of 
miles away from where they are, the expression 
of anti-slavery views has been almost a courting 
of martyrdom. The feeling dominated the 
church, the senate, the popular assembly, and 
the private saloon. Let a preacher plead the 
cause of the negroes, and his salary was stop- 
ped ; let a newspaper attempt the discussion of 
the subject, and it lost its subscribers ; let a 
representative broach it in Congress, and he 
was gagged and excluded fron the Committees, 
or politely invited to fight a duel. Public 
meetings called to consider it were dispersed by 
the mob ; petitions to the Federal Legislature 
against it were indignantly trampled under foot ; 
the United States mails were feloniously in- 
vaded in its behalf — while the ai?ents of anti- 
slavery societies were coated with tar and 
feathers, or mutilated, or hung upon a tree. It 
is true that all this has been since changed, but 
by means of what sufferings, what struggles, 
what strenuous and long-continued combats ! 



76 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

Even at this time, the pro-slavery sentiment is 
so largely in the ascendant, that no man of the 
most moderate anti-slavery convictions can hold 
office under the Federal Government — though 
that government represents, or ought to repre- 
sent, not a faction or a locality, but the whole 
people. 

De Tocqueville makes it an accusation against 
democratic societies, that they substitute a 
many-headed tyranny for that of a single man 
or of a single class, and the history of the anti- 
slavery controversy in this country, to our shame 
be it said, forces us to confess that, in this re- 
spect at least, his remarks are well grounded. 
"Fetters and headsmen," he exclaims, "were 
the coarse instruments which tyranny formerly 
employed ; but the civilization of our age has 
refined the arts of despotism, which seemed, 
however, to be sufficiently protected before ; 
the excesses of monarchical power have devised 
a variety of physical means of oppression ; the 
democratic republics of the present day have 
rendered it as entirely an affiiir of the mind as 
that will which it is intended to coerce. Under 
the absolute sway of an iudividual despot, the 



THE VESTIGES OF DESPOTISM. 77 

body was attacked in order to subdue the soul ; 
and the soul escaped the blows which were 
directed against it, and rose superior to the at- 
tempt ; but such is not the course adopted by 
the tyranny in democratic republics ; there the 
body is left free and the soul is enslaved. The 
sovereign can no longer say, " You shall think 
as I do on pain of death," but he says, "You 
are free to think differently from me and retain 
your life, your property, and all that you pos- 
sess ; but if such be your determination, you 
are henceforth an alien amongst your people : 
you may retain your civil rights, but they will 
be useless to you, for you will never be chosen 
by your fellow-citizens, if you solicit their suf- 
frages ; and they will aifect to scorn you, if 
you solicit their esteem. You will remain 
among men, but you will be deprived of the 
rights of mankind. Your fellow-citizens will 
shun you like an impure being ; and those who 
are most persuaded of your innocence will 
abandon you, too, lest they should be shunned 
in their turn. Go in peace ! I have given you 
your life, but it is an existence incomparably 
worse than death." There are, however, two fal- 



78 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

lacies in this — first, in supposing that the social 
proscription alluded to could subsist without 
passing over into muscular violence ; and, sec- 
ond, in the implication that the soul is less 
likely to rise superior to moral than to physical 
persecutions. The experience of this country 
has proved the contrary of both. It has shown 
how the virulence of prejudice soon runs into 
lynchings and mob-law, whence its peculiar 
dangers ; and it has shown, at the same time, 
by the reactions of the last few years, how ef- 
fectively the most overbearing majorities may 
be resisted. Yet, as w^e have already acknow- 
ledged, there is a basis of truth in De Tocque- 
ville's animated charges, as might be amply de- 
monstrated from the long, arrogant, insulting, 
and rancorous preponderance of the pro-slavery 
sentiment. 

But this sentiment has grown out of the 
existence of slavery itself, the last kind of des- 
potism to which we shall allude. It is need- 
less to remark upon its character as such, 
beyond the statement of the simple fact that 
four millions of human beings are held as pro- 
perty, which settles that point with an em- 



THE VESTIGES OF DESPOTISM. 79 

phasis. From its very nature, it is a despotism 
of force, of law, and of opinion combined — 
partially mitigated in practice by humane per- 
sonal considerations, but in theory absolute. 
It is administered, for the most part, by the 
whip ; it is sanctioned by legislation ; and it 
admits of no scrutiny or discussion. The 
master and the slave, therefore, are alike do- 
minated by the system. All that can be said 
of it, in the regions where it prevails, even by 
those most deeply interested in its results, 
must be said in its favor, on pain of peremptory 
banishment or assassination. Indeed the illu- 
sions as to its benefits and the sensitiveness as 
to its dangers, are both so extreme, that many 
a slaveholder allows himself to read no book 
nor to hear any conversation in which his posi- 
tive, unqualified, eternal right is disputed. 
What a pitiable and insane extravagance ! 
And, if he were consistent, to what a total in- 
tellectual solitude would he be reduced, in the 
present state of the civilized world. He would 
cut himself off from all the literature, and 
science, and politics of mankind. lie could 
read no magazines, foreign or domestic ; the 



80 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

best works of genius would be closed to him ; 
the investigations of science grow infectious ; 
and the debates of Congress intolerable. In 
fact there would be no resource for the class 
who institute this moral quarantine, but to 
imitate the habits of the chigo, as it is described 
by Sydney Smith, where he says that each one 
sets up its separate ulcer, and has his own pri- 
vate portion of pus. 

One would suppose that under the tremend- 
ous responsibilities of its condition, and the 
embarrassing perplexity of the problem it is 
called to solve, it would welcome every honest 
suggestion likely to throw light upon the case, 
and even court that collision of opinion out of 
which the truth is gradually struck. But it 
does no such thing ; it repels every approach 
as an insolence and an invasion of its rii^hts : 
and blindly surrenders itself to the darkness of 
fate. It is fortunate that all slaveholders are 
not of the same temper, that there are men 
among them too liberal and intelligent to fall 
into such unreasoning bigotry, who, on the 
contrary, study with an intense solicitude the 
bearings of their social structure, and eagerly 



THE VESTIGES OF DESPOTISM. 81 

seize upon every view of it which may afford 
them hope for the future. It is to them that 
we look for the wise management of their fear- 
ful trusts, and the eventual extinction of what 
they must confess to be a most undesirable re- 
lation. They are as yet sadly overborne by 
the pressure of opinions instigated by interest, 
but will soon acquire a strength which will 
place the control of events in their hands. 

Now, in respect to the several forms of des- 
potism which we have briefly enumerated, we 
shall not dwell upon their radical inconsistency 
with the life and spirit of our entire polity; for 
this consideration is too obvious to require 
pressing. Nor is there any occasion, now, to 
show the inherent weakness of any cause, or 
position, which shrinks from the fullest and 
fairest examination. But we cannot forbear 
remarking upon the deep and abiding injury 
which every man, who is unwilling to bring 
his actions or his sentiments to the test of 
scrutiny, does to himself, and the rest of man- 
kind. He shuts himself and society out from 
the only means of correcting error and at- 
taining knowledge. We know of no method 
4* 



82. POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

of arriving at the true relations of a subject, 
but the frank and candid discussion of it in 
every aspect. The time is past for believing in 
the existence of any infallible authority, whe- 
ther pope or king, whose decrees are to be con- 
sidered the final arbitrament of truth. There 
is no class or rank of men to whom we may 
look for a fixed and irrevocable standard of 
what it is right to think or proper to do. Our 
individual judgments are contracted, uncertain, 
warped by prejudices ; and the more profound- 
ly we have penetrated into the complex prob- 
lems of life which solicit solution, the more 
familiar we become with the vast extent and 
variety of human error, the more distrustful 
we grow of the authenticity and correctness 
of our own decisions. Yet, in the midst of 
the almost overwhelming multiplicity of crude 
and preposterous speculations, in the wild 
chaos of conflictinGT beliefs which storm around 
us, we do discover that the general mind is 
slowly eliminating one truth after another ; the 
immense laboratory of seething and fermenting 
thought is ever turning up some valuable and 
brilliant product ; and keen research and grap- 



THE VESTIGES OF DESPOTISM. 83 

pling argument secure us substantial conquests 
from the realms of ancient night. Discussion 
— free, open, manly, patient discussion — is the 
key which opens the treasure-chambers of na- 
ture and revelation, and the deep human soul. 
Like the cradles of the Californians, it sifts the 
golden metal from the common filth and dust. 
Summoning every variety of intellectual instru- 
ments to its aid, contemplating things in all 
their aspects, exposing falsehoods, detecting 
fraud, baffling selfishness, overwhelming igno- 
rance, and rectifying hallucination, it opens the 
way for the slow but majestic and beneficent 
march of the human intellect towards the mas- . 
tery of the world. 

No sensible man will now dispute the gigan- 
tic advances which the civilized races have 
made in the various departments of mathemat- 
ical and physical science, since they were com- 
mitted to the hands of free inquirers, nor wish 
to revert to those political institutions and re- 
ligious scruples by which their progress was so 
lonof fettered. Would it be less absurd to de- 
spair of the speedy success of the moral and 
political science, if they were once emancipat- 



84 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

ed from the despotisms by which they are 
checked ? The very triumphs of the former 
sciences are a ground of hope for the rapid 
and extensive improvement of the latter, when 
these shall have adopted the methods and be 
prosecuted in the spirit of those. " The prac- 
tice of rejecting mere gratuitous hypotheses," 
says the able author of " The Letters of an 
Egyptian Kafir," " of demanding facts, of re- 
quiring every step of reasoning to be clearly 
exhibited, of looking with perfect precision to 
the use of terms, of discarding rhetorical illu- 
sions, and mere phrases, of scouting preten- 
sions to infallibility, or exemption from rigor- 
ous scrutiny, are all required as indispensable 
in physical research, but cannot possibly be 
confined to the department of material philo- 
sophy. They will necessarily be extended to 
moral inquiries ; and, supposing that, in conse- 
quence of social proscription, or priestly or 
political tyranny, these latter subjects were 
totally abandoned, received no direct examina- 
tion, were exposed to no discussion for even a 
long period, were withheld (if we can conceive 
it possible) from the very thoughts of men, 



THE VESTIGES OF DESPOTISM. 85 

for half a century, yet the influence of physic- 
al investigation upon them could not, in the 
end, be prevented. All the correct principles 
of reasoning, all the improved metliods of re- 
search, all the habits of comparison and dis- 
crimination, all the love of truth, which the 
pursuit of any science has a tendency to estab- 
lish or engender, all the impatience of vague- 
ness, and obscurity, and assumption, v^hich the 
prosecution of inquiry superinduces in the 
spirit of men, would gather round the prohibit- 
ed subjects, ready, like hungry lions, to rush 
on what they had been withheld from, by the 
bars and chains and bolts of social or political 
despotism." 

With the admonitions of that paragraph, 
which we commend to all in the United States, 
who wish to obstruct the advances of opinion, 
on any subject, we dismiss our theme. 

Before quitting it entirely, however, let us 
add that we have been drawn to it by criti- 
cisms that we have seen, from time to time, 
passed upon the conduct of this magazine. A 
feeling of surprise has sometimes been express- 
ed that we should mingle with our lighter en- 



86 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

tertainments grave and thoughtful considera- 
tions of the leading political, social, scientific-, 
and religious topics of the day. But, surely 
they who express that feeling can neither have 
studied our course from the beginning, nor 
have thoroughly digested in their own minds 
the proper aims and duties of a first-class peri- 
odical. It was never our intention to issue a 
monthly exclusively for the milliners ; we had 
no ambition to institute a monoply manufac- 
ture of love-tales and sing-song verses ; and, 
if we had, we should have despaired of success 
amid the brilliant successes ah'eady achieved 
in that line. No ! we had other conceptions 
of the variety, the importance, the dignity, 
and the destiny of literature. Our thought, 
in establishing tliis enterprise, was, and it still 
is, that literature is the full and free expression 
of the nation's mind, not in heUes-leUrcs alone, 
nor in art alone, nor in science alone, but in all 
these, combined with politics and religion. It 
seemed to us, that the cultivated men, the lite- 
rary men of a nation, are among its best in- 
structors, and that they feebly discharge their 
function, if they are not free to utter their 



THE VESTIGES OF DESPOTISM. 87 

wisest thoughts, their most beautiful inspira- 
tions, on every subject whicli concerns the in- 
terests, the sensibilities, and the hopes of our 
humanity. Whether they pour forth their 
sense of beauty, grace, and gentleness in strains 
of poetry, or enlarge our knowledge of man in 
sketches of travel, or bring nearer to us the 
countless charms of our landscapes by natural 
descriptions, or help us to a clearer conception 
of great characters in biographic notices, or 
lift the disposition into cheerfulness and buoy- 
ancy by outgushings of humor, or refine our 
views of life and happiness by ideal portrai- 
tures, or expose pretension, arrogance, and 
folly, by caustic satire, or unfold the magnifi- 
cent vistas of science, or canvass the move- 
ments of parties and the measures of govern- 
ment in the light of great general principles, — 
they still belong to that higher priesthood, 
whose ministrations emancipate us from the 
care and littleness of daily life, who enkindle 
in us the love of the loveliest things, wlio re- 
veal the depths of our spirits, and " whose 
voices come down from the kingdom of God." 
But in order to the true manifestations of this 



88 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

exalted character, a free scope must be given 
to the action of their genius ; and such we 
trust they will ever find in the pages of this 
Monthly. 

Figaro says that he once conceived the pro- 
ject of setting up a journal, and that when he 
applied to the government for the necessary 
permit, they accepted his scheme with the 
warmest applause. " It will be a capital, ex- 
cellent thing," said they ; " and provided you 
never touch upon religion, nor politics, nor 
private society, nor the aftau's of the opera, and 
submit each article to the decision of three cen- 
sors, it shall receive our heartiest concurrence !" 

"Whereupon," adds Figaro, "finding that the 
best name for it would be Lc Journal Liutlle, 
I concluded to drop the enterprise." As for 
ourselves, we have no desire to publish a " use- 
less journal," and if we cannot "say our say" 
of what is passing, or, if we must cultivate the 
wonderful art by which politicians talk for a 
month without saying anything, we shall imi- 
tate the discretion of Figaro, and hasten to 
other fields of labor. 

November, 1854. 



OUR FOREIGN INFLUENCE AND 
POLICY. 

There are fifty thousand villages, more 
or less, in the United States, in each of 
which an oration is delivered on the 4th 
of July, and the orator who delivers it, 
when he comes to exhort his fellow-citizens on 
the greatness of their responsibilities, says, in- 
variably and solemnly, " the eyes of the world 
are upon us !" It would seem to be a pretty 
general conviction — among orators, at least — 
that the people of the universe have very little 
else to do than to watch the movements of 
Brother Jonathan. 

The same thought is implied in the frequent 
remark, which we hear, that it is our duty, as 
a nation, to teach mankind the way of repub- 
lican righteousness, by the beneficent influence 
of our example. When a late distinguished 
senator, who, with all his genius and virtue, 



90 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

was somewhat given to commonplace, elo- 
quently admonished Kossuth on the wicked- 
ness of his designs against our national virtue, 
he observed, w^ith manifest seriousness and 
sincerity, that there was no need of our in- 
terfering in European affairs, because Europe 
could be better reached by " the silent in- 
fluence of our great republican example." 

Now, it is unpleasant at any time to take 
the conceit out of a man, and to show that he 
is by no means so stupendous a creature as he 
fondly imagines. Nor is it any more agreeable 
to run counter to the self-complacency of a na- 
tion, or to feel obliged to say to it, in all honesty 
and truth, that it is not so magnificent a swell 
as its fancy paints it, or its flatterers represent ; 
yet, as we do not share the con\dction of many 
of our countrymen as to the tremendous and 
egregious figure they cut in the eyes of man- 
kind, we are forced to tell them as much, and, 
without wishing to abate one jot of the just 
estimate they may have formed of their grow- 
ing power and greatness, to explain frankly the 
grounds of our unpatriotic heresy. 

We do not wish to deny the almost miracu- 



OUR FOREIGN INFLUENCE AND POLICY. 91 

loiis growth of the people of the United States, 
in all the elements of national strength and 
grandeur. On the contrary, we are as proud 
as any Fourth of July orator can be, of those 
beneficent free institutions, which have raised 
us, in the course of half a century, from com- 
parative nothingness, into the first rank of 
nations. We glory in our success, not simply 
because it is success, nor because it flatters our 
patriotic instincts, but because it demonstrates, 
for the benefit of mankind, as well as of our- 
selves, the truth and benevolent efficacy of the 
democratic theory of government. But the 
question before us is not what we are in our- 
selves, nor what we have proved to ourselves, 
but what we have accomplished abroad, the 
interest the world takes in us, or more par- 
ticularly, the opinion they entertain of us in 
Europe. 

The United States are variously estimated 
in Europe by different classes of men. States- 
men, by the necessities of their profession, have 
a more or less familiar acquaintance with tlie 
workings of our governments, or with the 
statistics of our physical development. They 



92 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

know the number of oar people, and the spirit 
that animates them ; they know the general 
character and ability of our rulers ; the}^ know 
our popular ambitions ; but, with all this, they 
know little of our real, solid streugth. They 
under-estimate our integrity as a nation. Many 
of them momentarily expect that the Union 
will fall to pieces, or that, in a few years, our 
society will be plunged into the horrors of a 
servile and civil war. Others allege that we 
are immersed in the pursuit of gain, without 
inherent unity and elevation of spirit, and too 
essentially weak to stand the shocks of adver- 
sity and war. While others, again, suppose 
that the insane avidity of conquest, which they 
say is an inseparable characteristic of demo- 
cratic states, will impel us to one foreign ag- 
gression after another, until our territory shall 
have become too unwieldy for management. 
Thus, the statesmen of Europe? Avith incon- 
siderable exceptions, trained in monarchical 
theories, distrustful of the people, beholding in 
democratic extension only a lust for empire, 
and not a peaceful progress, surround the fu- 
ture of the young republic with dangers, and 



OUR FOREIGN INFLUENCE AND FOLIC Y. 93 

shut their eyes to the real significance of her 
history. Can they, then, be said to know the 
actual condition of our affairs ? 

Unfortunately, the persons we send abroad, 
as representatives, our ministers and charges, 
who, in virtue of their office, come in contact 
with the political classes, do nothing to enlarge 
the opinions held of us abroad, when inadequate, 
and nothing to correct them, when erroneous. 
Selected less on account of their fitness for 
their places, than because of the partisan ser- 
vices they may have rendered, they are, for the 
most part, men conspicuously unfit for their 
positions — ^ignorant of the language of courts ; 
ignorant of the laws of good manners ; ignorant 
of the history of diplomacy ; ignorant of the 
commercial relations of nations, and, of course, 
ignorant of their own country. Or, if they be 
not so fatally deficient of capacity or character as 
we have described, they carry abroad with them 
the vilest spirit of the tuft-hunter and the syco- 
phant. All their ambition seems to be to cir- 
culate in good society ; to dine with distin- 
guished ministers, and to hob-nob with princes 
and dukes. A favor from a king quite upsets 



94 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

their understanding. We remember to have 
met once, in Italy, not a thousand years ago, 
an American ambassador, whose whole talk re- 
lated to the eminent virtue and wisdom of the 
present weak and perjured king of Prussia, 
whom he extolled as a pattern of every do- 
mestic excellence, and a model among rulers. 
No court lacquey, with a red embroidered coat 
on his back, could have cherished a profounder 
regard for that monarch, or expressed his ad- 
miration in more unmeasured praises. Yet this 
eulogist of royalty was, perhaps, better than a 
predecessor of his, who had befouled his lega- 
tion with the vices of the debauchee and the 
drunkard. He was an exception, it is true, 
and regarded by a majority of his colleagues as 
a disgrace to the nation ; but one such exam- 
ple of an American diplomatist, in the course 
of twenty years, spreads more prejudice against 
us, and against the cause of republicanism, than 
fifty years of " the silent influence of example" 
can neutralize. 

Next to statesmen, the readers of the more 
intelligent books about the United States, like 
those of Dc Tocqueville, Chevalier, Van Reau- 



OUR FOREIGN INFLUENCE AND POLICY. 95 

mer, and Miss Martineau, acquire some know- 
ledge of us, and our concerns, but not on the 
whole an accurate or complete knowledge. 
The writers of those works we believe to have 
been honest, they conducted their inquiries 
with a desire to discover the truth, have stated 
thft results fairly, and in many respects have 
presented faithful, as well as important views, 
either of our manners or policy. De Tocque- 
ville's work, in particular, is characterized by 
a patient study of facts, and fine philosophical 
generalizations, but it is, after all, superficial, 
abounding in political as well as politico-eco- 
nomical mistakes, and inspiring a distrust of 
democracy, in the midst of all its apparent 
eulogies. But, if these were more satisfactory, 
they could do little towards informing public 
opinion, against the host of others, of inferior 
calibre — the TroUopes, Marryatts, and Dickens- 
es, whose narratives of travel are little better 
than caricatures. Where one copy of the more 
dignified and stately work of De Tocqueville 
is read, thousands of Dickens's " Notes" are 
circulated to counteract it ; or, where the latter 
do not penetrate, the newspapers, published in 



96 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

the interests of despotism, carry their slander- 
ous witticisms and lies. For the press, it 
should be remembered, as well as the pulpit, 
and all the other instrumentalities by which 
public opinion is formed, is under the control 
of the governments, and foster an unceasing 
and an unmitigated hostility to whatever 
makes in favor of liberalism. Everybody has 
observed how" vehemently abusive the leading 
English journals were towards America and 
Americans, until an increasing commercial in- 
tercourse had softened the asperities of the two 
nations, and made it the interest of both to 
cultivate more friendly feelings, which heaven 
strengthen and expand ! But there has been 
no such relenting on the continent, where the 
gazettes, that are allowed to speak of us at all, 
still maintain the old tone of banter, ridicule, 
and abuse. There is one of them in particular, 
that vile panderer to aristocratic assumption 
and pride, Galignani^s Messenger, of Paris, 
which purposely misrepresents every incident 
of our affairs, and every trait of our character. 
A European, who should form his opinion of 
us from the meagre and distorted accounts of 



OUR FOEEIGN INFLUENCE AND POLICY. 97 

this source, must look upon our society as in a 
chaotic and savage condition, destitute of all 
the higher elements of civilization, and quite 
given over to the blackleg and the cut-throat. 
Long columns of murders and outrages, such 
as may be gathered, by considerable industry, 
from the records of our extreme western bor- 
ders, are paraded as incidents of our daily life, 
alternated with the fantasies of Mormonism, or 
the terrors of servile insurrection. 

What can the "silent influence of example" 
do against this systematic and obstinate per- 
version of the truth ? What can societies, 
which know little of us, and that little con- 
veyed to them through discolored mediums, 
know of the practical workings of democracy 
in this country "? Kor is there much, in the 
conduct and character of Americans who tra- 
vel abroad, to improve the prevailing miscon- 
ceptions in Europe. A large number of our 
citizens make the world acquainted with their 
persons, not always to our advantage. Many 
of them, we are happy to say, do no discredit 
to their origin. Our young artists, and literary 
men, especially — some of our clergymen, and 



98 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

here and there a merchant, by their intelli- 
gence and unobtrusive modesty, produce the 
most favorable impressions. They circulate 
quietly in the best families, and by the infor- 
mation they diffuse as well as by their maa- 
ners, commend their country no less than them- 
selves to a kind regard. But by far the larger 
proportion of our nomadic tribes — commercial 
men, generally, who, having scraped up a rapid 
fortune, conceive it necessary to achieve a tour 
of Europe — without education, or refinement, 
or clear or earnest republican convictions — by 
their ridiculous aping of the extravagances of 
foreign fashion, and their loud, blatant, vulgar 
parade of wealth, utterly repel and disgust, 
not only the people of standing, but the 
common people, who often have as nice a dis- 
cernment of what is true and becoming as the 
more cultivated classes. They are also almost 
universally conservatives, who deride or aftect 
to deride the government of their country, pro- 
fessing great admiration of the methods and 
doings of the monarchies, while, in every dis- 
cussion of the vital principles that distinguish 
between despotism and democracy, their sym- 



OUR FOREIGN INFLUENCE AND POLICY. 99 

pathies lean, if not avowedl}^ at least impli- 
citly, to the side of power. Oh, how bitterly 
have we heard the leaders of the great eman- 
cipating movement of Europe complain of this 
base treason of the Americans, to whom tliey 
naturally looked for support, but only found a 
mean and detestable aflfectation of aristocracy. 
The poor fellows had read our constitutions 
and laws, had heard of our prosperity, had 
caught the echoes of those public rejoicings in 
which we boast so much of the glories of re- 
publican freedom, and they expected to en- 
counter in every native, born to the inheritance 
of such noble institutions, the friend of uni- 
versal liberty. Alas, a moment's conversa- 
tion has filled them with astonishment and 
dismay ! None of us forget, we presume, the 
high hopes with which that exalted and accom- 
plished man, Kossuth, came to our shores, 
expecting to meet in every man a soldier of 
the democracy, by which he had been redeem- 
ed ? But can we recall some of the incidents 
of his tour without a blush, deeper than the 
crimson of yon decaying maple ? Can we for- 
get the low abuse, the cold contempt, the 



100 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

shallow compliments with which he, the exile, 
the patriot, the hero — after being feted and 
extolled, as no foreigner ever was before — was 
allowed to return ? What, though he lo-ved 
his countiy too well and sought too eagerly to 
enlist the active sympathy of others in her 
cause — what, though, in his burning sense of 
the degradation and suifering of the European 
masses, he would have raised a crusade of free- 
dom against the despots of the w^orld — could 
we not, on a calm consideration of our foreign 
relations, have respectfully declined his invita- 
tions, or discreetly postponed the acceptance 
of them to a more fitting time, should a more 
fitting time ever come — without joining in the 
hue-and-cry of the oppressors against him, 
heaping him with invectives, ridicule, and 
taunts ? Did he not brini^ to us as vouchers 
of his sincerity, and as appeals to our regard, 
a long life of patient, noble, and magnanimous 
struggle against wrong — an eloquence that 
eclipsed all ancient and modern fame — attain- 
ments in language and history that seemed 
exhaustless in their variety and grace — and, 
more than all, the sad, but honorable fact of his 



OUR FOREIGN INFLrENCE AND POLICY. 101 

exclusion from every land but our own and 
England ? Yet, in the face of these immortal 
titles to regard, these claims upon our gener- 
ous indulgence and ardent love, there were 
some Americans who could take part in his 
systematic revilement and misconstruction ! 
Need we wonder, then, that a similar class 
abroad pursue a career, and profess senti- 
ments, which bring us into lasting and wide 
dishonor ? 

But, w^orse than the general want of infor- 
mation about us in Europe, worse than the 
latent or blatant infidelity to their principles of 
Americans, official or otherwise, worse than 
the calumnies of Dickens, Galignani, or the 
Times, are the uses which the upholders of 
despotism make of the existence of slavery in 
the southern portions of this confederacy. Its 
apparent inconsistency with our leading politi- 
cal principles, and the exaggerations which 
prevail in regard to its practical evils, enable 
them to depict us, one and all, as slave-drivers 
and oppressors, bent only on the pursuit of 
gain, to w^hich we sacrifice alike the dictates 
of justice, the restraints of self-respect and 



102 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

the promptings of patriotism. Unwilling or 
unable to apprehend the peculiar structure of 
our government, they confound all the inhabit- 
ants of the States into one mass of miscreants, 
who w^ar at will upon humanity, kidnapping, 
torturing, outraging, and slaying their poor 
victims, with all the lust and none of the re- 
morse of tigers. Behold, they exclaim, the 
model republic, behold democracy in prac- 
tice, behold the boasted freedom of America, 
— three millions of human beings in the 
dust, while their free and independent task- 
masters 

" Chain tliera and task them, and exact their sweat !" 

It is in vain that the leaders of the liberal 
movements try to explain away this imputed 
disgrace ; in vain they show the origin of sla- 
very, in vain they state its intricate connection 
with the vital interests of society, in vain they 
allege the fewness of those who are implicated 
in it, in vain they describe it as an exception 
and an anomaly, while they point out the be- 
neficent and glorious efiects which freedom 
has wrought for us, in the flice of this alleged 



OUR FOREIGN INFLUENCE AND POLICY. 103 

weakness — a story of negro oppression, well- 
told, will scatter their declamations to the 
winds, and damage our repute, through large 
circles of influence, and over long periods of 
time. 

There are, however, one or two checks to 
these disparaging views, which operate with 
some force in Europe. A considerable number 
of the common people acquire no small, though 
perhaps a vague, knowledge of the United 
States, from the correspondence of their friends 
who have emigrated hither, and who write 
back to their impoverished relatives of their 
easy success in the life of the New World. In 
crossing the Atlantic on one occasion, for in- 
stance, we saw a shabby-looking German on 
board the vessel, who had been ill nearly all 
the voyage, and only as we neared port had 
been able to crawl on deck to snufF the fresh 
air. Entering into conversation with him, we 
learned that, some six years before, he had left 
his fatherland, to settle in tlie west ; he had 
contrived by his labor to purchase a farm, and 
to stock it ; a railroad w^as opened near his 
house, and now he was returning to his native 



104 • POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

village, with ten thousand dollars in bank, to 
persuade his father, and as many of his neigh- 
bors as he could, to remove to the land which 
had been a Golconda to him. " But why will 
you not remain in Germany," we asked, " now 
that you have the means to live V" His reply 
was, that " the freedom of America was more 
to him than its opportunities of fortune. He 
had left his home in a condition not better than 
that of a slave ; he returned to it the citizen 
of a great and noble nation, where he was 
eligible to the highest distinctions, and the 
equal of all his fellows, universally respected 
as such. Could he remain in a rotten despotism, 
where the alternative of his personal and poli- 
tical subjection was civil war V Now, that 
man was a missionary of republicanism, spread- 
ing the aspiration, if not the knowledge of 
freedom, and. with his compeers of the same 
stamp, working silent revolutions of states, 
which in the form of emigration move whole 
townships to their exodus. 

It is evident, at the same time, that such 
men rather kindle hope, than impart knowledge. 
They create a private impatience of the re- 



OUR FOREIGN INFLUENCE AND POLICY. 105 

straints of despotism, without communicating 
precise intelligence as to the nature of repub- 
licanism. They cannot be said, therefore, to 
instruct or form public opinion ; and the same 
thing might be remarked of the professed re- 
volutionists, who, though they have read our 
history, and caught inspirations from the great 
deeds of our forefathers, and informed them- 
selves of our subsequent triumphs, yet inocu- 
late their followers rather with spirit than with 
knowledge. One is often surprised, in convers- 
ing with the liberals of Europe, even with 
distinguished men among them, to discover 
how little they really know of the genuine 
principles of republicanism, how much of their 
liberal enthusiasm is a recoil from oppression, 
mingled with wild hopes of liberty, and what 
a chasm there is between their notions of what 
government should be, practically, and our 
own calm, firm, easy-working, and just, scien- 
tific, political system. One does not, however, 
infer from these, the unfitness of the European 
liberals for freedom — (seeing that it demon- 
strates their unfitness for every other political 

state but that of freedom — for how can such 
5* 



106 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

men abide absolutism ?) — but simply the vague- 
ness of their conceptions, and particularly their 
want of an intimate acquaintance with our in- 
stitutions. Had they studied the American 
example more, they would entertain more con- 
sistent and enlightened political theories. They 
would have been saved from many of the 
vagaries of socialism, retaining only its scien- 
tific elements, and their practical attempts at 
the realization of freedom would not have 
miscarried with such signal disaster. 

Four splendid exceptional events, however, 
in our foreign intercourse have stamped them- 
selves upon the memories and hearts of many 
in Europe. AVlien the noble frigate the Mace- 
donian, a war ship no more, 

" Built in the eclipse aud rigged with curses dark," 

but a messenger of love, was freighted with the 
generous contributions of the American people, 
to the starving people of Ireland, a thrill of 
electric joy, passing through the frames of the 
sufferers, w^as caught and carried round the 
globe, as far as the deed was heard. When, 
too, the inevitable Jackson extorted from lin- 



OUR FOREIGN INFLUENCE AND POLICY. 107 

gering France, the just dues of our citizens, on 
the single condition of "Pay or we'll make 
you," the old diplomats of Europe, accustomed 
only to protocolling, intriguing and postponing, 
raised their dro\Ysy heads, to ask with some 
astonishment, "Who is this impertinent young 
genius that dares to talk to a venerable monarchy 
in this strain"?" So also the able reply of Mr. 
"Webster to the impertinences of Hulseman, fell 
with a crash among the mouldy archives of 
Vienna. But no event, we suspect, has been of 
more efficiency in awakening the Old World to a 
consciousness of our existence, than the prompt, 
decided, and glorious act of Captain Ingraham, 
when, in the face of the Austrian fleet, he 
threw the national segis over the prostrate form 
of a poor Hungarian exile, and pointed to his 
guns. The shout of Vive la Rejmhlique, which 
circled around the hills of Smyrna, was echoed 
from the hearts, if not the voices of millions 
of men. 

In spite of these occasional impressions, we 
cannot but think, in respect to the mark we 
make in Europe, that the majority there 
really knows little about us ; that, among the 



108 POLITICAL ESSAYS., 

conservative classes, we are grossly and will- 
fully misjudged; that, among the liberal and 
popular classes, we are estimated through ex- 
aggerating mediums rather than by any correct 
standard, while our political influence is only 
indirect and casual, and by no means commen- 
surate to our power and station. Those patri- 
ots of the Fourth of July stamp, who go about 
like peacocks, admiring their own prodigious 
tails, are hardly justified in their vanity by the 
actual facts; for while they are contemplating 
themselves through a glass of compound mag- 
nifying power, the world is looking at them, 
when it looks at all, through an inverted tele- 
scope. 

It is a matter of small concern to a man 
what the world may think of him if the su- 
preme object of life be to take care of the main 
chance, letting the universe wag as it may. 
But a man whose life is guided by great prin- 
ciples, who cherishes exalted convictions of 
duty, who is solicitous for the welfare of his 
fellows, who conceives that he is the possessor 
of truths of vital significance and moment, is 
anxious that his name should be respected, and 



OUR FOREIGN INFLUENCE AND POLICY. 109 

his influence felt. For the same reasons a na- 
tion, of high aims and honorable ambition, and 
especially a nation that holds itself to be in 
some sort the representative and responsible 
director of a vast and beneficent movement, 
desires to receive a due consideration and def- 
erence. The historical nations which have 
moulded the ^destinies of humanity — Greece, 
Rome, France, England, Russia — are the na- 
tions that have asserted their own titles to 
respect, not in empty boasting, but by actual 
deeds — while the nations which have lingered 
in the race, impressing no character on ad- 
vancing civilization, and leaving no footsteps, 
even in the desert — China, Japan, Turkey, 
Portugal, Spain — are those which have shut 
themselves up in their own exclusive circles, 
and pursued no broad, generous, world-em- 
bracing policy. 

The slight impression, therefore, that the 
United States has yet made on the nations of 
the globe is to be deplored. Both we our- 
selves and the world have been losers by the 
default. Our internal advancement has been 
unparalleled ; but we have achieved no corre- 



110 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

spouding external influence. We have an all- 
sufficient consciousness of our own strength, 
but Christendom has failed to recognize it ; is, 
in fact, only beginning to feel it remotely, 
putting us aside in all the great controversies 
of the nations, as bearded men thrust aside an 
ungrown boy, or rather overlooking our ex- 
istence as though we were not. Who has 
thought, for instance, in the arrangements of 
" the Eastern question," which have now agi- 
tated Europe for a year, that the United States 
had anything to do with the matter? Has it 
been so much as consulted in a single move- 
ment"? Is it ever reckoned in these or any 
other of the vast distributions of Jiuman in- 
terests and human happiness, as one of the 
parties to be advised with"? Kot at all; we 
are not enumerated among the Great Pow- 
ers — are indeed left out of the calculation, as 
the crippled, the blind, the diseased, or the old 
women are omitted in a council of war. But 
is this a position for a great people? It is 
tme, that it may not have been, and may not 
yet be, for our interest, to take part in Euro- 
pean troubles — but, then, it is for us, and not 



OUR FOKEIGN INFLUENCE AND POLICY. Ill 

for others, to determine how far and when we 
shall act or not act. We must be the masters 
of our own destinies, and not mere ciphers in 
the world, like the savage tribes of our western 
wilderness, or the remote, feeble, degraded, 
despised islanders of the Pacific. If we are 
one of the nations of the earth — sovereign, inde- 
pendent, and powerful — let it be so distinctly- 
understood ; but if we be not, let us stop our 
fatuous boastings, and sink quietly down, like 
an oyster, in its complacent mud, satisfied with 
whatever of succulence the chance weaves waft 
to our shells. 

The course of our argument has brought us, 
it will be seen, to a consideration of the proper 
foreign policy of the government, which is now 
beginning to occupy the field of American poli- 
tics. Thus far we cannot be said to have had 
a foreign policy. Our attention has been so 
absorbed by urgent domestic necessities, that it 
has left us neither time nor capacity to engage 
in the complicated debates of the external 
world. Can this be so any longer? With 
commerce weaving a network for us over every 
sea — with traveling and trading citizens in 



112 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

every country — with an expanding territory, 
that, while it looks back to Europe, is also 
lookinff over to Asia — with a whole continent 
and its adjacent islands to the south, imploring 
either exploration, or protection, or annexation 
— with new^ channels of adventure opening on 
every side — watli friendly nations struggling in 
the grasp of contending despotisms, and be- 
seeching us for sympathy and aid — wath one 
neighbor of insatiate maw striving to monopo- 
lize the opulent markets of the East — with 
another imitating the ambition of Charlemagne 
or Napoleon, for universal empire — in short, 
with a thousand varying impulses and seduc- 
tions, driving and soliciting our mercurial and 
fearless people, it is inevitable that we shall 
get involved, wiiether we will it or not, in the 
great political, industrial, and social movements 
of mankind. We are, in fact, already em- 
barked on the wide, wdde sea — we have quitted 
the petty streams of our inland, and the timid 
harbors of our coast, and there is no course 
left for us but to guide the gallant vessel of 
state, cleaving the outer tides, with all a sea- 
man's prudence and a seaman's tact, and yet 



OUR FOREIGN INFLUENCE AND POLICY. 113 

with all a seaman's daring, and a seaman's 
dauntless energy. 

" There lies the port ; the vessel puffs her sails, 
There gloom the dark, broad seas." 

The problem for ns, then, is not whether we 
shall have a foreign policy, for that, as we con- 
tend, is already decided by events, but what 
that policy shall be. How shall we deport 
ourselves towards the other nations of the 
earth ? What position shall we assume in their 
controversies ? What character and course do 
we mean to assert for ourselves? — these are 
the imminent and clamorous c|uestions of the 
time. They are questions which, in one as- 
pect, bristle with difficulties, but which, in 
another aspect, are of the readiest solution. 
If we mean to launch forth upon the troubled 
waters of existing diplomacy — if w^e design 
to conduct our affairs according to the tra- 
ditional laws of intrigue and deceit, which 
are the accepted methods of courts and bureaus 
— we shall be plunged at once into endless 
embarrassments; but, if we desire simply to 
adhere to our own convictions of right and 



114 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

duty, avoiding all entangling alliances, and 
disdaining all complicated and juggling ma- 
noeuvres, but asserting our own principles at 
all hazards, the way for us is clear — not wholly 
free from embarrassments, but free from dis- 
honor and disgrace. 

Tell us what an upright, sympathetic, fear- 
less man — a man of unequivocal, unswerving 
principles — would do in the society of his 
equals and fellows ; tell us what aims he would 
cherish, what deportment he would maintain, 
what prudent and wdse, but unfailing maxims 
he would lay at the fountain-head of all his 
being ; and we will tell you what ought to be 
the foreign as well as the domestic deportment 
of a great nation ! For nations are but larger 
men, governed by the same rules of jus- 
tice and Christian sympathy and principle. 
Prove that it is best for a man to be con- 
trolled only by the probabilities of his com- 
mercial success — prove that the circle of his 
interest and that of his immediate family ought 
to be the horizon of his endeavors and hopes — 
prove that he has no vital connection wnth, or 
joint responsibility for his race — and then we 



OUR FOREIGN INFLUENCE AND POLICY. 115 

pledge ourselves to prove the same low theory 
of existence as the true policy of that man's 
nation ! But admit, on the other hand, that 
Christianity, and its heir and legatee, demo- 
cracy, have revealed a higher and nobler ideal 
of life, and then you admit that nations are 
moral beings, bound to a rigid obedience to, 
and an active prosecution of, all the laws of 
human duty, according to their condition. 

Now, the United States, in reference to the 
other nations of the earth, are placed in this 
relation. They are young, fresh, and vigorous, 
abounding in wealth, exulting in strength, and 
eager for action. They come of a race, the 
Anglo-Saxon, seemingly endowed with a death- 
less spring and vitality — a race which crushed 
old Rome, when Rome oppressed the world 
— which reared the stupendous structure of 
British enterprise — which impelled the armies 
of the Reformation — which planted in the New 
World the hardiest of its colonists — and which 
now, commanding the citadel as well as the 
outposts of civilization, wields the destinies of 
all the tribes. They have been reserved by 
Providence, moreover, for the exemplification of 



116 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

the most beneficent theory of government that 
was ever vouchsafed to man. Great heavens! 
how can we, then, how can any American, 
hesitate as to the great part his country ought, 
and is clearly called, to play in the rapidly- 
developing drama of the nineteenth century ? 

What! exclaims some tremulous Aspen, who 
has money in the funds, Would you have 
America, like an opium-crazed ClnDese, 

" Run a muck, and tilt at all he meets ?" 

Must it, the Anacharsis Clootz of nations, pro- 
claim itself the " orator of the human race," or, 
like a Don Quixote of democracy, go searching 
the world for forlorn damsels to protect? 

For his sake, we will be a little more explicit. 
The United States, we have said, must have a 
foreign policy — good or bad, wise or foolish, 
self-advanciuG^ or self-debasino-. It must have 
it ; for it cannot escape, if it would, the posi- 
tion forced upon it by its relations to the world. 
It cannot cut the web of trade which it lias 
thrown round the globe ; it cannot seclude 
itself from all contact with other nations; it 
cannot fly from the contagion of sympathy ; it 



OUK FOREIGN INFLUENCE AND POLICY. 117 

cannot leap the bounds of knowledge, nor avoid 
the dominion of morals and religion. Yet, 
trade, contact, sympathy, knowledge, religion, 
all compel it to a decision of the mode in which 
it will bear itself in its international inter- 
course. 

It seems to us that our true policy may be 
expressed, under its several heads, as follows . 
1st, a rigid fidelity, both at home and abroad, 
to the great democratic principle, which is the 
essence of our national life ; 2nd, a prompt and 
full protection of every citizen, guiltless of 
wrong, wherever he may be, and whoever he 
may be ; 3rd, an exact fulfillment, to the very 
letter, of the obligation of treaties, at every 
cost ; 4th, the instant arrest of all schemes of 
foreign aggression, coupled with a willingness 
to receive into the Union new nations, that are 
thoroughly republican in their government and 
their societies; and, finally, an avowed and un- 
reserved sympatliy with people struggling for 
their emancipation, the earliest recognition of 
their independence, and a guaranty of that inde- 
pendence, when once established, against the 
forceful or wanton interference of other nations, 



118 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

and in support of the uniform and acknowledged 
public law of the civilized world. 

The majority of these points, we are sure, 
will meet approval in this community. No 
American can wish that our republic should 
be other, in any of its bearings, than a demo- 
cratic republic ; no American can be reasonably 
opposed to the pacific extension of commerce ; 
no American, out of Sing Sing, or the lunatic 
asylum, would wish to deny the sanctity of 
treaties. As to the protection of all citizens, 
the recent demonstrations on the Koszta aftair 
have settled that ; and so, the only reservations 
or controversies our schedule suggests, must 
relate to the form in wdiich it has presented the 
subjects of annexation and intervention. 

No one can be more profoundly convinced 
than we are, that the best interests of the 
American people look to a concentration, rather 
than a dispersion of their power. We have 
land enough — more than can be occupied and 
cultivated for two hundred years; we enjoy 
already every variety of climate and every 
character of soil ; we have no formidable neigh- 
bors to threaten our progivt^^! in any direction; 



OUR FOREIGN INFLUENCE AND POLICY. 119 

and we have no need of conquests, either to 
insure our future expansion or to fortify our 
present tenures. The projects of colonial ag- 
grandizement, which some put forth, are as 
uncalled for as they are unprincipled. If they 
were undertaken, they could but distract our en- 
ergies, waste our resources, retard the increase 
of manufactures and the arts, excite sectional 
animosities, provoke foreign wars, and, suppos- 
ing them successful, add nothing essential to our 
internal strength. No nation that ever existed 
had less to expect from violent aggressions than 
ours ; to none is the example of barbarous, old, 
all-conquering Rome, which has been conspicu- 
ously cited to inspire us, less applicable ; for to 
none is the arbitrary genius of military enter- 
prise more repugnant, or the gentle arts of 
peace more congenial. Away, then, with the 
mad schemes of plunder and bloodshed, with 
which the lust of adventure strives to impreg- 
nate the restless excitability of our people 1 

But, though we oppose the frenzy of terri- 
torial acquisition, let us not oppose the gradual 
and legitimate growth of tlic nation ! The 
concentration of our capital and industry on the 



120 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

opportunities we already possess, the carefal 
yet rapid development of our internal resources, 
the energetic pursuit of present advantages, 
the advancement and perfecting of the civilizing 
tendencies nov7 at work — these must be our 
prime o)3Jects : but a Chinese exclusiveness, an 
iron-ringed and churlish repulsion of foreign 
accretions, must never be thought of. If there 
are nations about us — Canada or Mexico — 
eager to participate in the benefits of our 
federal union — if they are poor, dependent, dis- 
tracted alone, while they would become rich, 
vigorous, and happy united, let us not forbid 
the banns of marriage, but welcome them to 
our arms with a bridegroom's embrace. 

The federal relation is the true relation for 
all people, 

" The unity and mari-iod cidm ol" states,"' 

bearing the richest fruit, sanctifying and sweet- 
ening intercourse with delicious friendships, 
while the old treaty relation is a cold, casual, 
and licentious cohabitation — a bondage of fear 
and feebleness, and exposed to perpetual strifes. 
The latter is uncertain and willful ; the former 



OUR FOREIGN INFLUENCE AND POLICY. 121 

constitutional and permanent. Tlie one de- 
pends on the caprice of monarchs and majorities 
— tlie other is fixed by eternal, ever-strengthen- 
ing law. The one is a mere alliance, as fragile 
as the whims of those who are parties to it ; 
but the other is a union, steel-clasped and ce- 
mented, yet fluent with freedom. Thus, while 
the older nations of Europe exhibit the specta- 
cle of hostile camps, which enjoy peace during 
temporary truces only, these thirty nations of 
the New World are joined in a perpetual amity, 
each free, yet as a whole harmonious. The 
principle of federal union, in short, is the high- 
est principle of political connection known to 
man ; and wherever it is permitted to extend, 
will carry with it the blessings of peace, indus- 
try, wealth, and popular enlightenment, even 
until the world shall be embraced in that 

" Immortal league of love, which brings 
Our free, broad empire, state with state." 

As to what our screed of doctrine asserts in 

regard to intervention, it is nothing more than 

a declaration that we onght to uphold the 

recognized international law of the world, 
6 



122 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

against all wanton violations of it ; or, in the 
words of Mr. Webster, that we are prepared 
"to protect neutrality, to defend neutrality, 
and, if need be, to take up arms for neutrality." 
It brings us, we admit, into direct conflict with 
the policy proclaimed by certain European 
sovereigns, at the congresses held successively 
at Aix-la-Chapelle, Troppau, Laybach, Verona, 
and Vienna, and which substituted their own ar- 
bitrary will for the long-settled and clearly-rec- 
ognized international law of Christendom. It 
will be remembered that the maxims announced 
during those colossal plots against the rights of 
man and the dignity of nations were : 1st, that 
all popular and constitutional rights were held 
only as grants from the crown, or, in their own 
language, "that useful and necessary changes 
in legislation and in the administration of states 
ought only to emanate from the free will and 
well-weighed conviction of those whom God has 
intrusted tcith iiouer — while all that deviates from 
this line necessarily leads to disorder, commo- 
tions, and evils far more insufferable than those 
they pretend to remedy ;" which was an un- 
blushing allegation of the divine right of kings; 



OUR FOUEIGN INFLUENCE AND POLICY. 123 

and 2ncl, the right of the sovereigns to interfere 
in the affliirs of other nations — or, to use their 
own words again, " their undoubted right to 
take a hostile attitude in regard to those states 
in which the overthrow of the government 
may operate as an example;" which means 
their right to suppress attempts at popular en- 
franchisement, wherever they might be made. 

Now, against the first of these atrocious doc- 
trines, our very existence as a nation is an open, 
direct, and standing protest ; for, if it be true, 
then our very existence as a free people is an 
act of rebellion, a state of anarchy, a daring re- 
sistance of the will of God ! But the second 
of them is no less flagrant an outrage on public 
law and national rights. Both reign supreme 
over the continent of Europe, and have been, 
time and time again, forcefully asserted. When 
Spain restored the liberal constitution of IS 12 
— when Naples revolted against the tyranni- 
cal Ferdinand — when Sardinia rose for its con- 
stitutional rights — when Poland, with a cry 
of agony, sprang from under the foot of the 
trampling Russ — when Germany rang with the 
patriotic cry of German unity — when Hungary, 



124 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

by a series of gallant and glorious battles, had 
repelled the iiustrian invader from her soil, 
and, in the eloquent, touchiug tones of her 
great leader, proclaimed her original independ- 
ence — when Rome, catching from the noble 
spirit of Mazzini some of her ancient vu'tue, and 
her ancient valor, expelled her oppressors — the 
banded despots of that infamous league, called 
the Holy Alliance, stood by to extinguish the 
rising sentiments of liberty. Tlie whole history 
of Europe, indeed, for the last thirty years, has 
been one continuous scene of monstrous and 
brutal outrage, inflicted by the parties to this 
pact of despotism, on people over whom they 
had no legitimate control, against the estab- 
lished law of nations, and against all justice, 
and all humanity. 

Now, we say, that it is the bounden duty, the 
only wise, and, in fact, safe policy, for the 
United States, as a free and Christian nation — 
as a nation rejecting utterly, and with loathing, 
the infernal system of the monarchs, to protest 
against it, totis viribus, on every occasion, and at 
any risk. We say, that whenever any of these 
unhappy mediatized nations shall rise, to cast 



OUR FOREIGN INFLUENCE AND POLICY. 125 

off foreign oppression, our sympathies sliould 
be allowed to rush forth to ifts encouragement 
and aid ; and that, when it shall have expelled 
the intruder, we should at once, and gladly, 
recognize its independence, and guaranty it, 
if need be, against the pillage of the imperial 
robbers. All that such a guaranty implies 
is an earnest and decided protest, in the name 
of \iolated law and outraged humanity, against 
a gigantic usurpation and fraud. Coming from 
the fresh young Republic of the West, and 
echoing from the hillsides of the Alps and the 
Apennines, along the valleys of the Rhine and 
the Danube, such a protest would be heard 
among the tottering dynasties like the roar of 
advancing thunder. It would be wafted, on 
its passage, by the ascending sighs of the na- 
tions ; it would gather into one the voices of 
good men everywhere, and fall upon the startled 
ears of the conspirators like a blast from the last 
trumpet, calling them to judgment. 

We have not the slightest apprehension that 
such a course would result in war. In the 
hazard of provoking a universal rising of the 
European populations, we do not believe that 



126 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

any despot would be found bold enough to en- 
gage in a contest with an active and powerful 
foreign antagonist, against the known public 
law of the civilized world. That law, accord- 
ing to the dictates of justice, according to 
the established usage, according to received 
writers, is the complete, sovereign, exclusive 
independence of each nation, so long as it 
trespasses on no other nation. All nations, 
therefore, are interested in maintaining it, as 
much as individuals are interested in maintain- 
ing the laws of the society to which they be- 
long. But, if it is to be thrown aside by the 
supporters of absolutism whenever it pleases 
them, then it must be disregarded by the sup- 
porters of freedom whenever it pleases free- 
men. There cannot be, in reason or equity, a 
right of intervention for one, and no right of 
intervention for the other — a right of systematic 
and persistent combination for the despots, but 
no right of combination for the democrats. If 
the monarchs engage in a Holy Alliance, the 
people must counteract them by another Holy 
Alliance, in the spirit of Beranger's well-known 
and beautiful poem. 



OUR FOREIGN INFLUENCE AND rOLICY. 127 

Should a war, however, spring out of it, in 
what more just or magnanimous battle could 
a great people engage ? Unlike the contests 
which have so often desolated our poor earth, 
it would not be a strife for territory, nor for a 
line of succession, nor for the subjection of 
weak dependents, but a glorious struggle for 
liberty, justice, and humanity — for the stricken 
rights of nations, for the violated majesty of 
law, for enlarged human intercourse, and for 
the golden rule of Christian civilization. 

October, 1853. 



ANNEXATION. 

How many and loud are the objurgations 
with which that pattern father of a family, Mr. 
Bull, visits the marauding propensities of his 
disinherited son, Jonathan ? " The graceless 
urchin," the old gentleman is constantly repeat- 
ing, " who has already grown so large that his 
feet stick out far beyond his trowsers, is as 
greedy as one of his own turkey-buzzards, and 
as sharp and unconscionable as one of his own 
peddlers. He has, during the very short time 
that he has lived, clieated the poor Indians out 
of twenty or thirty States ; has flogged Mexico 
into the relinquishment of half a dozen more, 
is bullying Spain for the surrender of Cuba, 
has hoodwinked Kamehameha I., until he 
scarcely knows wliether the Sandwich Islands 
are his own or not, and is deliberately survey- 
ing Japan with a view to some future landing ! 
Was there ever a more unprincipled, insatiable, 



ANNEXATION. 129 

rapacious, gormandizing Filibuster than that 
same Jonathan, who fancies that the whole 
world was made for use, and his use, too, and 
has no more scruple about laying his hands upon 
any part of it, than a fox has in satisfying his 
hunger in a goose-pen !" 

Having said this, Bull rolls up his eyes in the 
most moral manner, heaves a lugubrious sigh, 
and sits down to a perusal of the Times, which 
contains several long colums of dispatches from 
India, and a general account of the colonies 
from Australia and the Cape, to the most north- 
ern iceberg on which Capt. Maclure has recent- 
ly hoisted the "meteor-flag." 

He is somewhat consoled by the perusal, and 
especially by the comments of the editor on the 
inappeasable ambition of republics. They en- 
courage him into a sound appetite for his rolls 
and coffee, after which he smilingly turns to 
Punchy whose jokes upon yankee-doodledom 
are very mirthful, causing John to split his fat 
sides almost, over cunning exposures of Ameri- 
can hypocrisy, boastfulness, negro-driving, and 
land-stealing. Meantime, the entertaining vol- 
umes of some traveler in " the States" are laid 
6* 



130 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

upon his table, hot from the press, and brilliant 
with the keenest sarcasms provoked by our vul- 
garity, which the facetious Cockney (who, if he 
were called upon to read aloud what he had 
written, could not pronounce his own mother 
tongue,) shows up in a variety of the most 
amusing lights. 

Well, touching a great deal of this, which 
gives John a good laugh, we shall have nothing 
to say ; many of us enjoy it quite as much as 
he can, and for bettter reasons ; but on the 
subject of annexation, or the imputed zeal of 
republics to grasp all they can get, we mean to 
put in an apology, using that word in its anci- 
ent sense, as both a denial and a justification. 
on the part of nations to take the property 
We mean to prove, firstly, that a willingness 
of their neighbors is no new thing under the 
sun, so that if the United States had been 
guilty of it, they would have been acting only 
in a line of decided precedents. And we mean 
to prove, secondly, that we have not been guilty 
of it at all, in any injurious sense, while our 
entire national action and diplomacy have been 
more liberal, just, candid, and forbearing, than 



ANNEXATION. 131 

those of any other nation. Yes ; you facetious 
and vituperative Bulls ! wc have been the first 
among nations to set the example of an open, 
generous, equitable international policy, and 
whatever advances modern statesmen may have 
made toward the substitution of highminded 
negotiations for over-reaching intrigue and se- 
cret diplomacy, they have in nothing surpassed 
us much calumniated republicans ! 

Many of the foreign tourists and editors, who 
chatter of American annexation, really seem to 
suppose that annexation has never before been 
heard of in the history of mankind. '• Did you 
ever !" they exclaim in tones of offended virtue, 
like an old lady, who has just been told some 
precious piece of scandal, forgetting, in the ex- 
cess of her indignation and surprise, the small 
indiscretions of her own youth. " Did you ever ? 
These republicans must be actually insane in 
their avidity for more lands ! Not satisfied 
with the immense slice of the western conti- 
nent they now possess, they warn us Europeans 
oft" the rest of it, and are consumed with fiery 
desires for the islands of the sea. Like the re- 
publics of old, like the republics of Italy, this 



132 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

modern republic gives token of the character- 
istic weakness of its kind ; it must live by con- 
quest, and, like all its forerunners, swell until 
it bursts." 

Oh ! Crapaud and Bull, how can you utter 
such nonsense ? Annexation is no new thing, 
nor is it peculiarly republican ! Every page 
of history is full of it, from the time of the ear- 
liest vagabond and fugitive, Cain, who built a 
city in the land of Nod, which w^as not his, un- 
til the latest English war in Burmah ! It is the 
one subject, indeed, the burden of human an- 
nals. The first command given to Noah, after the 
flood, was to be fruitful, and multiply, and re- 
plenish the earth, or, as it may be translated, take 
possession of the earth, and ever since, that divine 
injunction, if no other, has been faithfully obey- 
ed by his descendants. Do we not all remem- 
ber, that the condition of the magnificent bless- 
ings which the Lord promised to Abram, was, 
that he should begin a long process of annexa- 
tion, by " getting out of his own country, and 
Ins own kindred, and his father's house," and 
settling in another land ? What was the Exo- 
dus of the children of Israel, under Moses, but 



ANNEXATION. 133 

% 

a preparatory step to the seizure of Canaan, 
which was no sooner taken than it w^as divided 
by lot, among the nine and a half tribes, the 
other two and a half having already pocketed 
their allowance on this side the Jordan ? And 
what the whole subsequent career of the He- 
brews under Joshua, but a series of skirmishes 
with their amiable neighbors, the Amorites, the 
Hittites, the Hivites, the Jebusites, etc., whose 
country they had invaded, annexing '* all the 
land, the hills, the south country, the valley 
and the plain, and the mountain of Israel and 
the valley of the same ;" appropriating the cat- 
tle, despoiling the cities, smiting the kings, and 
utterly routing and rooting out the people, so 
that, as we are told, " not any one was left to 
breathe !" Nor was this wholesale and slaugh- 
terous policy much changed under the judges 
and the kings, in spite of the reverses experi- 
enced at the hands of the Moabites, the Midian- 
ites, and the Philistines ; for, scarcely had they 
recovered their power under Saul and David, 
before they struck out again to the right and 
left, burning cities, levying bond- service, and 
converting everybody's territory to their own 



134 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

use. JerusaleQi, their great city, fell a prey 
at last to the same spirit, manifested by their 
Koman neighbors ; yet, on the heels of this 
overwhelming disaster, the last vaticination of 
the apostle of Patmos, as his prophetic eyes 
swept down the tracks of time, was, that good 
Christians everywhere should " inherit the land." 
The flict is, that none of these Orientals were 
ever over particular as to seizing the territories 
of a friend. If they wanted what he possessed, 
they took it, and gave him a drubbing if he ob- 
jected. As far back as we can penetrate in 
their annals, even to those remote periods when 
the twilight of tradition itself merges in the 
primeval darkness, we find that their kings and 
leaders were adepts in the annexing business, 
carrying it on on a prodigious scale, and quite 
regardless of the huge rivers of blood which 
they often had to wade through, in the accom- 
plishment of their purposes. Some of them, 
indeed, have left no other name behind them, 
for the admiration of posterity, than that ac- 
quired in expeditions undertaken with the 
laudable design of stripping a neighbor of his 
possessions. We know little of Sesostris 



ANNEXATION. 135 

and Semiramis ; but that little is enough to 
justify Edmund Burke, in setting over against 
the conquests of the former, about one million 
of lives, and against those of the latter, about 
three millions. " All expired," he exclaimed, "in 
quarrels in which the sufferers had not the least 
rational concern." Old Nebuchadnezzar, too, 
who flourished in Babylon, according to the 
Bible, what a thriving fellow he was in this line ! 
The little state of Judea was scarcely a flea-bite 
for him ; and though he despoiled Egypt, and 
demolished Tyre, he was quite uncomfortable 
until Phoenicia, Palestine, Syria, Media, Persia, 
and the greater part of India, were added to 
his already considerable farm. Nor, was he, 
after all, to be compared to that series of mag- 
nilicent Persian monarchs, who thought no more 
of razing hundred-gated cities to the earth, and 
laying hold of vast empires, than Barnum's 
anaconda does of bolting a rabbit "? There was 
first, Cyrus, a most prosperous gentleman, as 
the good Xenophon relates, who overran pretty 
much the whole of Asia ; and next, his promis- 
ing son, Cambyses, who took Tyre, Cyprus, 
Egypt, Macedonia, Thrace, etc. ; and then his 



136 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

son again, Xerxes, "a chip of the old block," 
and finally his descendants once more, Artaxerx- 
es, first, second, and third — all " chips of the old 
block" — what a way they had of sacrificing mil- ' 
lions upon millions of people in their little ter- 
ritorial disputes ? It was well, indeed, that the 
Greeks, at Marathon, put a stop to the ravages, 
or there is no telling to what extent they might 
have carried their sanguinary sports — perhaps 
as far as Alexander of Macedon, who, begin- 
ning with a small strip in the south of Europe, 
annexed patch after patch, until he became, be- 
yond all question, the largest landed proprietor 
in the known world. A bird flying for several 
days together in a straight line, could scarcely 
have passed from the western to the eastern 
boundaries of his dominions. A splendid an- 
nexationist, truly, was the great Alexander ! 

There was one of the ancient nations, more 
modest than the rest, which we ought to except 
from this career of conquest and spoliation ; for 
during the greater part of its existence it was 
content with its own moderate limits, and the 
production of Iliads, Prometheus Vinctuses, Par- 
thenons, and Orations de Corona. We refer to 



ANNEXATION. 137 

Greece, whicli, being more republican than the 
rest of the world, ought to have been, accord- 
ing to the modern theory, more omnivorous 
than the rest. But Greece was poor-spirited 
in comparison. She had become so enamored 
with her own glorious skies and hills, was so 
delighted with her own flxir climate, and so be- 
sotted, with a certain dreamy notion of beauty 
and self-perfection, that, like a w^oman as she 
was, she seldom passed beyond her own thresh- 
old. Not that she was afraid of fighting, either, 
as certain places named Thermopylae and Sala- 
mis bear witness ; but that she was quite des- 
titute of that grandeur of soul which led Belus, 
Sesostris, and the other illustrious individuals 
to whom we have referred, to cut their way to 
glory, by cutting the throats of so many of 
their fellow-humans. 

We shall have to dismiss republican Greece, 
then, as rather an untoward case, and turn to 
imperial Rome. Ah ! how her records blaze 
with examples of a thorough spirit of annexation ! 
Suckled by a wolf in the beginning, Rome never 
lost her original vulpine nature, but, to the 
day of her dissolution, went prowling about the 



138 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

world, wherever there was a sheep-fold to break 
into or an innocent lamb to be eaten. Look into 
the index of any popular history of her triumphs, 
and mark how it is composed of one unbroken 
series of annexations ! Thus it reads : b. c 283, 
the Gauls and Etrurians subdued ; b. c. 278, 
Sicily conquered j b. c. 266, Rome mistress of all 
Italy ; b. c. 264, the first Punic War ; b. c. 231, 
Sardinia and Corsica conquered ; b. c. 224, the 
Romans first cross the Po ; b. c. 223, colonies 
of Placentia and Cremona established ; b. c. 
222, Insularia (Milan) and Liguria (Genoa) 
taken ; b. c. 213, the Second Punic War ; 
b. c. 212, Syracuse and Sicily conquered ; b. c. 
210, Scipio takes New Carthage ; b. c. 204, 
Scipio carries the war into Africa ; b. c. 195, 
war made upon Spain ; b. c. ISS, Syria reduced 
to a Roman province ; b. c. 168, Macedon be- 
comes a Roman province ; b. c. 149, Third Pu- 
nic War and conquest of Corinth; b. c. 146, 
Greece becomes a Roman province ; b. c. 135, 
Spain a Roman province ; b. c. 133, Perga- 
us a Roman province; b. c. 118, Dalmatia a 
Roman province ; b. c. 1 05, N umidia becomes 
a Roman province ; b. c. 99, Lusitania becomes 



ANNEXATION. 139 

a Koman province ; b. c. SO, Julius Ca3sar's 
first campaign — and after that the reduction of 
the world, from the hot sands of the desert, 
south, to the fogs of Britain in the north, and 
from the Euphrates to the Atlantic Ocean, in 
the other direction. The veiii, vidi, vic'i. in short, 
was not an individual saying, but a universal 
Roman maxim. 

We might refer, too, now that we are on the 
train of historical locomotion, to those extraor- 
dinary migrations of the German races, who 
seem to have had no other object in life than 
to overrun the territories of others, and who, 
in the end, coming on like whirling sand-storms 
of the desert, paid Rome in her own coin ; or 
to those exciting episodes of the Middle Ages, 
when myriads of pious and blood-thirsty cru- 
saders flung themselves upon Asia, to recover 
the Holy Land; or to the impartial ferocity 
of the Spanish and Portuguese in their excur- 
sions over South America ; or to the lively 
annals of treachery, freebooting, and assassina- 
tion by which the many great and royal houses 
of Europe built up their power — such as the 
house of Bourbon, which gradually enlarged its 



140 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

right to a few acres, to a right coextensive with 
France — or to the house of Hapsburg, a small 
German dukedom at the start, but now a 
mighty emph'e in which a dozen kingdoms are 
absorbed — or to the house of Bonaparte, which 
began without a sous to bless its stars with, 
but which speedily enlarged its phylacteries, 
and got itself warm on nearly all the thrones 
of the Continent : or, in brief, to a hundred 
other instances of enormous adventure and gi- 
gantic brigandage. But the truth is, that this 
kind of thing is the staple and uniform of all 
annals. 

Rabelais, in his famous outline of conquest, 
which the gallant statesmen of Pichricole pre- 
sented to that chivalric monarch, though he 
has caught the spirit of this national Rob-Roy- 
ism, combining its own largeness of view with 
the easy effrontery of the swell-mob, hardly 
equals veritable history. '' You will divide 
your army," said the Duke of Smalltrash, the 
Earl of Swashbuckler, and Captain Durtaille, 
who were Pichricole's advisers, " into two parts. 
One shall fall upon Grangouzier and his forces ; 
and the other shall draw towards Onys, Xain- 



ANNEXATION. 141 

toigne, Angoumois, and Gascony. Then march 
to Perigourt, Medos, and Elanes, taking, wher- 
ever you come, without resistance, towns, cas- 
tles, and forts ; afterwards to Bayonne, St. 
John de Luz, to Fuentarabia, where you shall 
seize upon all the ships, and, coasting along 
Gallicia and Portugal, shall pillage all the mara- 
time places even to Lisbon, where you shall be 
supplied with all necessaries befitting a con- 
queror. By Copsodie, Spain will yield ; for 
they are but a race of boobies ! Then are you 
to pass by the Straits of Gibraltar, where you 
shall erect two pillars more stately than those 
of Hercules, to the perpetual memory of your 
goodness, and the narrow entrance there shall 
be called the Pichricolinal Sea. Having passed 
the Pichricolinal Sea, behold Barbarossa yields 
him your slave ! And you shall conquer the 
kingdoms of Tunis, of Hippo, Argia, Bomine, 
Corone, yea, all Barbary. Furthermore, you 
shall take into your hands Majorca, Minorca, 
Sardinia, Corsica, with the other islands of the 
Ligustic and Balearian seas. Going along on 
the left hand, you shall rule all Gallia, Narbonen- 
sis, Provence, the Allobrogrians, Genoa, Flor- 



142 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

eiice, Lucca ; and then — God be wi' ye — Rome ! 
Italy being thus taken, behold Naples, Calabria, 
Apulia, and Sicily, all ransacked, and Malta, 
too ! Thence we will sail eastward, and take 
Canadia, Cyprus, Rhodes, and the Cyclade 
Islands, and set upon the Morea. It is ours, 
by St. Irenaeus ! and the Lord preserve Jerusa- 
lem !" With the enumeration of Lesser Asia 
and the entire east of Europe, the imagination 
of the monarch was excited, and he shouted, 
*' On, on, make haste my lads, and let him that 
loves me, follow me !" 

No! the fertile fancy of Rabelais, in the 
broadest play of its fun, does not equal the 
serious doings of some even of our modern 
nations. " A century ago," says the latest 
Blackwood, " Russia, still in the infancy of 
civilization, was scarcely counted in the great 
European family. Gigantic, indeed, have been 
the forward strides she has since made, in 
power, influence, and territory. On every side 
she has extended herself; Sweden, Poland, Tur- 
key, Persia, have all in turn been despoiled or 
partially robbed by her. North and south she 
has seized upon some of i\w nm^t pioductive 



ANNEXATION. 143 

districts of Europe ; the Baltic provinces on 
the one hand, Bessarabia and the Crimea on 
the other." 

Be it observed, however, in justice to critic 
and criticized alike, that Eussia is bashful, self- 
denying, almost ascetic in her lust of annexa- 
tion, compared with another power, which we 
shall not name, lest w^e should shock its deli- 
cate sensibilities. But we could tell, "an we 
would," of a certain little island of the North 
Atlantic, in itself scarcely bigger than a bed- 
spread, yet boasting of an empke on which the 
sun never sets. It has annexed to its slender 
chalk-cliffs, from year to year, one country 
after another, until now it exclaims, in the 
pride and plenitude of its dominion — 

" Quae regio in terris, nostra non plena laboris ?" 

which, in its own vernacular, means, " on what 
part of the earth have we not gained a foot- 
hold?" In Europe, there are Scotland, Ireland, 
the Orkneys, Gibraltar, Malta, Heligoland, and 
the Ionian Isles ; in Amenca, there are Upper 
and Lower Canada, Nova Scotia, Cape Breton, 
New Brunswick, Prince Edward's Island, New- 



144 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

foundland, and the Bermudas ; in the West 
Indies, there are Jamaica, Barbadoes, St. Vin- 
cent, Tobago, Trinidad, Antigua, Dominica, 
the Bahamas, Guiana, and a dozen more ; in 
Africa, there are Good Hope, Mauritius, Sierra 
Leone, Gambia, and St. Helena ; in Austraha, 
there are New South Wales, Western Austra- 
lia, Southern Australia, and Van Dieman's 
Land ; and in Asia, there are, most monstrous 
of all, Ceylon and India, with its dependencies. 
Enough, one would say, in all conscience for a 
reasonable ambition ; but it is not enough for 
the people of that little island — that model of 
all the national proprieties — which omits no 
opportunity now for extending its possessions, 
and almost with every steamer sends us word 
of new acquisitions in tlie East ! 

Alas ! we must repeat it, annexation is not 
a new thing, not a peculiarity of republicans, 
and of late American republicans, in particu- 
lar; not in any sense a novel iniquity over 
which we are just called to moralize! It is a 
practice as old as our race and as broad as our 
race ; known to every people and every age ; 
and as invariable,, in its occurrence, as a natural 



ANNEXATION. 145 

law. Wherever there have been" weak nations 
to pillage, and strong nations to pillage them ; 
wherever there have been men, like those 
splendid robbers of antiquity, willing to offer 
hecatombs of lives to their insane will to rule ; 
wherever there have been chances opened to 
military genius, to rapacious selfishness, to the 
love of a row, to the hope of plunder, to the 
appetite for distinction and blood, to the mere 
vague, restless feeling for movement and change 
— there annexation has flourished. But, God 
in heaven ! what a phantasmagoria of wrong, 
outrage, and despotism, its career unfolds ! 
What spoliations, ravages, wars, subjugations, 
and miseries have marked its course ! AVhat 
crimson pictures it has painted on every page 
of almost every history ! How the whole past, 
as we look at it, comes rushing down upon our 
vision, like a vast, multitudinous, many- winged 
army ; with savage yells, with wild piercing 
whoops, with ringing war-cries, with sackbuts, 
and cymbals, and trumpets, and gongs, and the 
drowning roar of cannon ; naked heroes, shaggy 
sheep-skinned warriors, glittering troops, pha- 
lanxes and serried legions, colossal cavalries ; 
7 



146 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

now sweeping like frost-winds across the plains 
— now hanging like tempests on the mountains 
— now breaking in torrents through rocky de- 
files — and now roaring like seas around the 
walls of cities — onward and downward they 
come, irresistible, stormy, overwhelming : the 
mighty host, the stupendous vanguard of never- 
ending annexationists ! 

Note, also, that it is not in conquest alone 
that this spirit of aggrandizement has been ex- 
hibited ; for, next to the history of conquest, 
the most terrible book that could be written 
would be a narrative of national colonization, 
or of the peaceful attempts of nations to create 
auxiliaries on distant shores. It would be a 
second Book of Martyrs, eclipsing in atrocities 
the rubric of Fox. It would show us innumer- 
able homes, in all lands, made vacant by forced, 
or, quite as dreadful, voluntary exiles: the 
pathways across the lonely seas, lined, like the 
accursed middle passage of the slave-trade, 
with the bones of victims cast down to watery 
deaths ; the inoffensive natives of many a conti- 
nent and island driven mercilessly, by intrud- 
ers, to the jungles, or the swamps, or to the 



ANNEXATION. 147 

solitary fastnesses of the mountains; weary- 
years of struggle on the part of the intruders 
themselves against disease, against poverty, 
against capricious and persecuting climates and 
intractable soils, and against the cruel extor- 
tions and oppressions of remote administrations ; 
and, as the end of all, failure, in its worst 
forms, of industrial bankruptcy and social ruin. 
Now, compared with the Brobdignagian 
scoundrelism of the older nations, both in the 
way of conquest and colonization, what have 
we poor republican Americans done? Why 
are we stigmatized, as offenders above all 
others, or as the special representatives of that 
national avidus alicnum, which confesses neither 
limit nor principle '? We have, since the com- 
mencement of our political existence, perfected 
three things : we have entered the lands of the 
Indians ; we have acquired Louisiana, Florida, 
and Texas ; and we have beaten Mexico out of 
California and a few other morsels of earth ; to 
which let us add, that a few wild fellows of us 
meditate some time or other getting possession 
of Cuba, and, perhaps, of the Sandwich Islands. 
That is positively the front and substance of all 



148 POLITICAI ESSAYS. 

our trespasses ! But in what manner have they 
been committed ? 

No one, we suppose, will question the pro- 
priety of our mode of acquiring Florida and 
Louisiana, which were purchased honorably in 
the open market ; therefore we will begin watli 
the poor Indians. We have robbed them of 
their lands, it is said. But it is not so ; not a 
rood of their land have we wdiich has not been 
honestly paid for, and more than paid for, as 
land goes, and a thousand times paid for in 
superior returns! De Tocqueville made this 
charge in his book, and led Mr. Benton, who 
was then in the Senate of the United States, to 
call for a full " numerical and chronological 
official statement of all our dealings w^ith the 
Indians, from the origin of the federal govern- 
ment in 17S9 to his day, 1S40," which he pro- 
cured from the department, making a full and 
accurate list of every acre that we had ever 
taken from any Indian tribe or individual. 
What is the result ? Why, it appears from the 
document, that the United States had paid to 
the Indians eighty-five millions of dollars for 
land purcliases up to the year iSiO, to which 



ANNEXATION. 149 

five or six millions may be added for purchases 
since — say ninety millions. This is near six 
times as much as the United States gave Na- 
poleon for Louisiana, the whole of it, soil and 
jurisdiction, and nearly three times as much 
as all three of the great foreign purchases — 
Louisiana, Florida, and California — cost us ! 
and that for soil alone, and for so much as 
would only be a fragment of Louisiana or Cali- 
fornia. " Lnpressive," says the distinguished 
statesman, to whom we are indebted for this 
exposition of an Lidian policy, "as this state- 
ment is in the gross, it becomes more so in 
the detail, and when applied to the particular 
tribes whose imputed sufferings have drawn so 
mournful a picture from Mons. de Tocque- 
ville." Fifty-six millions went to the four 
large tribes, the Creeks, the Cherokees, the 
Choctaws, and the Chickasaws, leaving thirty- 
six millions to go to the small tribes whose 
names are unknown to history, and which it is 
probable the writer on American democracy 
had never heard of when sketching the picture 
of their fancied oppressions. Mr. Benton adds, 
in respect of these small remote tribes, that, 



150 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

besides their projDortion of the remaining thirty- 
six millions of dollars, they received a kind of 
compensation suited to their condition, and in- 
tended to induct them into the comforts of 
civilized life. He gives one example of this 
drawn from a treaty with the O sages in 1839, 
which was only in addition to similar benefits 
to the same tribe in previous treaties, and 
which were extended to all the tribes which 
were in the hunting-state. These benefits were, 
"two blacksmith-shops, with four blacksmiths, 
five hundred pounds of iron, and sixty pounds 
of steel annually; a grist and a saw-mill, with 
millers for the same; 1,000 cows and calves; 
2,000 breeding swine; 1,000 ploughs; 1,000 
sets of horse-gear ; 1,000 axes; 1,000 hoes; a 
house each for ten chiefs, costing two hundred 
dollars a piece ; with six good wagons, sixteen 
carts, twenty-eight yokes of oxen, with yokes 
and log-chains for each chief; besides agreeing 
to pay all claims for injuries connnitted by the 
tribe on the white people, or on other Indians, 
to the amount of thirty thousand dollars ; to 
purchase their reserved lands at two dollars per 
acre; and to give them six thousand dollars 



ANNEXATION. 151 

more for certain old annuities. In previous 
treaties had been given seed grains and seed 
vegetables, with fruit seed and fruit trees, 
domestic fowls, laborers to plough up their 
ground and to make their fences, to raise crops 
and save them, and teach the Indians how to 
farm ; with spinning, weaving, and sewing im- 
plements, and persons to show their use." Now 
all this, observes our authority, was in one 
single treaty, with an inconsiderable tribe, 
which had been largely provided for in the 
same way in six different pre\dous treaties ! 
But all the rude tribes — those in the hunting- 
state, or just emerging from it — were provided 
for with equal solicitude and liberality, the 
object of the United States being to train them 
to agriculture and pasturage, to conduct them 
from the hunting to the pastoral and the agri- 
cultural state. Not confining its care, however, 
to this, and in addition to all other benefits, the 
United States have undertaken the support of 
schools, the encouragement of missionaries, and 
a small annual contribution to religious socie- 
ties who take charge of their civilization. More- 
over, the government keeps up a large estab- 



152 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

lishmeiit for the special care of the Indians, 
and the management of their affairs ; a special 
bureau, presided over by a commissioner at 
Washington City; superintendents in different 
districts ; agents, sub-agents, and interpreters, 
resident with the tribe ; and all charged with 
seeino- to their ris^hts and interests — seehi2; that 
the laws are observed towards them; that no 
injuries are done them by the whites ; that 
none but licensed traders go among them ; that 
nothing shall be bought from them which is 
necessary for their comfort, nor anything sold 
to them which may be to their detriment. Had 
the republic been actuated, in its intercourse, 
by any of that selfish and infernal spirit which 
animates the old monarchies, it would have 
swindled or beaten the Indians out of their 
possessions at once, and, in case of resistance, 
put the whole race to the sword. 

But it will be answered, " You have carried 
them by force, from their ancient homes, from 
the graves of their sires, and planted them in 
new and distant regions !" We reply, that we 
have done so, in the case of a few tribes, or, 
rather, remnants of tribes, as a matter of abso- 



ANNEXATION. 153 

lute necessity, and not in any grasping or un- 
kind spirit. A small, but savage and intractable 
race suddenly surrounded by a powerful and 
civilized people, whose laws and customs it 
cannot or will not accept, but whose vices are 
readily spread among them, has no other des- 
tiny but to die of its corruptions, to perish in 
arms, or to be removed by gentle methods to 
some more remote and untroubled hunting- 
grounds. It was at the option of the United 
States to choose either of these courses, and its 
choice, on the advice of Jefferson, whose noble 
fortune it has been to initiate so much of our 
most wise and beneficent policy, fell upon the 
most humane, peaceful, and considerate of the 
three. Indeed, the language in which this plan 
was urged, in the second inaugural address of 
the eminent democrat we have just named, 
may be used also as the language of the history 
which records its execution. " The aborigines 
of these countries," said he, "I have regarded 
with the consideration their position inspires. 
Endowed with the faculties and the rights of 
men, breathing an ardent love of liberty and 

independence, and occupying a country which 

7* 



154 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

left them no desire but to be undisturbed, the 
streams of overflowing population from other 
regions directed itself on these shores. With- 
out power to divert, or habits to contend 
against it, they have been overwhelmed by the 
current, or driven before it. Now reduced 
within limits too narrow for the hunter-state, 
humanity enjoins us to teach them agriculture 
and the domestic arts — to encourage them to 
that industry which alone can enable them to 
maintain their place in existence, and to pre- 
pare them in time for that state of society 
which, to bodily comforts, adds the improve- 
ment of the mind and morals." We have, 
therefore, liberally furnished them with the 
implements of husbandry and householding ; 
we have placed instructors amongst them in 
the arts of first necessity ; and they are covered 
vrith the aegis of the law against agressors from 
among ourselves. A few stubborn individuals, 
misled by prejudice or ambition, and carrying 
with them fragments of their tribes, have re- 
sisted the inevitable fate of their race, and have 
compelled our authorities to subdue them by 
arms ; but the greater part of the tribes have 



ANNEXATION. 155 

gone to their new homes beyond the Missis- 
sippi cheerfully, and in peace. Some, like 
the Cherokees, have been raised to a higher 
civilization ; and all are in a condition superior 
to that in which they were found by our 
people. 

The annexation of Texas, secondly, it is 
needless to dwell upon, because it was an 
event so inevitable as a historical development, 
and so clear in all its principles, that it requires 
no justification. A bordering people, in the 
natural increase of population and trade, settle 
in a foreign state, where they acquire property 
and rear families ; they gradually become citi- 
zens, and look upon the place as their home ; 
but they are oppressed by the government, and 
rise in revolt ; they carry on a successful revo- 
lution ; they organize and maintain a free and 
stable government ; they are acknowledged as 
independent by all the leading powers of Chris- 
tendom ; and then, to secure themselves from 
external assault, and to acquire additional in- 
ternal strength — led, too, by old and natural 
affinities — they seek a constitutional alliance 
with the people to whom they formerly be- 



156 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

longed, and are still cordially attached. That 
is the whole history of Texas; and we see 
nothing, in our yielding to her request for ad- 
mission to the rights and protection of the 
Federal Union, that is in the least extraordi- 
nary, or atrocious, or greedy. As a question 
of domestic policy, the annexation may have 
properly divided opinion ; but as a question of 
international relations, nothing could have been 
more simply and obviously just. 

Again : in respect to conquests, we have but 
one to answer for — that of Mexico ; and there 
is nothing in either the commencement, the 
course, or the end of that— if even it may be 
called a conquest — for which the lover of his 
country or humanity needs to blush. It was 
a regular war, begun in vindication of the 
clearest national rights, w^hich had been out- 
raged ; carried on with vigor, but with the 
strictest regard, also, to the most just and hon- 
orable principles; and closed by a deliberate 
treaty, in which, though it was in our power to 
confiscate the whole nation, by reducing it to 
the state of a dependent province, we refrained 
from all arbitrary or exorbitant demands, and 



ANNEXATION. 157 

agreed to pay generously for every acre of land 
that we retained, and for every iota of loss we 
had occasioned. It is true that the territories 
thus acquired, proved, subsequently, through 
their unexampled mineral deposits, to be of 
priceless worth ; but this peculiar source of 
value was unsuspected at the time, while it is 
probable that, if they had remained in the same 
hands, they might have been unknown to this 
day. 

Compare, then, the "annexation" of the 
United States, for which it is so largely ridi- 
culed, or so roundly abused, with the same 
process as it has been conducted by other na- 
tions ! Not with those predatory expeditions 
of the magnificent bandits of the East ; not 
with the Roman conquests, which were inces- 
sant scenes of violence and tyranny ; not with 
the irruptions of the northern hordes, whose 
boast it was that no grass grew where they had 
trod ; not with the merciless and gory marches 
of Pizarro or Cortes, because those were the 
deeds of rude and brutal ages ; nor yet, even 
with the stormy anahasis and Jcaiabasis, as De 
Quincy somewhere calls it, when 



158 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

" The Emperor Xap. lie did set oflf 
On a pleasant excursion to Moscow ;" 

but compare it with the more modern, and 
therefore, we may suppose, the more just and 
humane management of their external relations, 
by any of the most advanced nations of Europe ! 
With the treatment of Algiers by the French, 
for instance ; or of Poland by Russia ; or of 
Hungary and Italy by Austria ; or of Ireland 
and India by England ! We shall see the latter 
subduing, plundering, depopulating, wherever 
they spread ; maintaining their supremacy only 
by armies of functionaries and soldiers, w^ho 
consume the substance and blast the industry 
of their dependents ; and shaping their entire 
policy with a single eye to their own interests. 
We shall see, also, that they are hated and 
cursed, wnth unrelenting bitterness, by their 
victims. On the other side, we own fio sub- 
ject nations, no colonial victims, no trembling 
provinces — and we never desire to own them ; 
we waste no fields, we ruin no cities, we ex- 
haust no distant settlements : the weak Indian 
tribes among us, we have striven to redeem 
and civilize ; the weak Mexican and Spanish 



ANNEXATION. 159 

races about us, a prey to anarchy and misrule, 
we offer the advantages of stable government, 
of equal lavrs, of a flourishing and refined social 
life ; and we aim at no alliances which are not 
founded on the broadest principles of reciprocal 
justice and goodwill. Away, then, with the 
base calumnies which hold us up to the world 
as a nation of reckless filibusters ! Away with 
the European cant of the invading tendencies 
of republicanism ! 

*' Our past, at least," as Webster said, "is 
secure." It brings no crimson to our cheeks : 
not, however, that our people are any better 
in themselves than other people — human nature, 
we suppose, being much the same everywhere 
— but because our free and open institutions, 
through which the convictions of men, and not 
the interests of monarchs or families, are ex- 
pressed, incite no sinister and iniquitous pro- 
ceedings. The glory of Republicanism is, that 
it is above-board, reflecting solely the extant 
wisdom and justice of the aggregate of its 
supporters.* 

* It is honorable, in one sense, and yet humihating, in 
another, to confess that the srreatest achievement of the United 



160. POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

Thus far, we have only disposed of the in- 
vectives of foreigners, showing what gratuitous 
and unfounded malice they are ; but we have 
yet to consider our subject in its most import- 
ant aspect — its bearings upon the external 
policy of the state. The annexation of con- 
tiguous territories, in one shape or another, is 
a question that must constantly arise in the 
course of our progress, and it is well for us to 
know the true principles on which it should be 
managed. 

From the time that Adam was sent out of 
the sunset gate of Eden, down to the exodus 
of the Pilgrims, and the hegira from all lands 
into the golden reservoirs of California, there 
appears to have been a decided movement 
southward and westward, of the populations of 
the world. It was never constant and con- 
tinuous, and yet, contemplated in large epochs, 
it was always discernible. By natural growth, 
by the multiplying ties of trade, by warlike 
excursions, by voluntary migrations, by revolu- 
tions, and by colonizations, the superior races 

States yet, in the way of extiuguisliing a foreign people, was 
tlie celebrated bombardment of Grey town. 



ANNEXATION. 161 

of the great central cradles of Western Asia 
have spread, pursuing the paths of the sun, 
until they now quite circle the globe. Nor is 
there any reason for believing that this diffusive 
connatus will be stopped, while there remains a 
remotest island, or secluded western nook, to 
be reduced to the reception of Christianity and 
European arts. An instinct in the human soul, 
deeper than the wisdom of politics, more 
powerful than the sceptres of states, impels 
the people on, to the accomplishment of that 
high destiny which Providence has plainly re- 
served for our race. 

Annexation thus being an inevitable fact, it 
would be in vain for the American people to 
resist the impulses which are bearing all na- 
tions onward, to a closer union. Nor, when 
we consider the attitude in which we are placed 
towards other nations of the earth, is it desirable 
for us, or them, that this influence should be 
resisted. As the inheritors of whatever is best 
in modern civilization ; possessed of a political 
and social polity which we deem superior to 
every other ; carrying w^th us, wherever we 
go, the living seeds of freedom, of intelligence, 



162 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

of religion ; our advent everywhere, but par- 
ticularly among the savage and stationary tribes 
wlio are nearest to us, must be a redemption 
and a blessing. South America and the islands 
of the sea ought to rise up to meet us at our 
coming, and the desert and the solitary places 
be glad that the hour for breaking their fatal 
enchantments, the hour of their emancipation, 
had arrived. 

If the Canadas, or the provinces of South or 
Central America, were gathered into our Union, 
by this gradual and natural absorption, by this 
species of national c?idosmosis, they would at 
once spring into new life. In respect to the 
fomier, the contrasts presented by the river St. 
Lawrence, which Lord Durham described, and 
which are not yet effaced, would speedily dis- 
appear. " On the American side," he says, 
" all is activity and bustle. The forests have 
been widely cleared ; every year numerous 
settlements are formed, and thousands of farms 
are created out of the waste ; the country is 
intersected by roads. On the British side, with 
the exception of a few favored spots, where 
some approach to American prosperity is ap- 



ANNEXATION. 163 

parent, all seems waste and desolate. . . The 
ancient city of Montreal, which is naturally the 
capital of Canada, will not bear the least com- 
parison in any respect with Buffalo, which is a 
creation of yesterday. But it is not in the 
difference between the larger towns on the two 
sides that we shall find the best evidence of 
our inferiority. That painful but undeniable 
truth is most manifest in the country districts, 
through which the line of national separation 
passes for a thousand miles. There on the side 
of both the Canadas, and also of New Bruns- 
wick and Nova Scotia, a widely scattered po- 
pulation, poor, and apparently unenterprising, 
though hardy and industrious, separated by 
tracts of intervening forests, without town or 
markets, almost without roads, living in mean 
houses, drawing little more than a rude subsist- 
ence from ill-cultivated land, and seemingly 
incapable of improving their condition, present 
the most instructive contrast to their enterpris- 
ing and thriving neighbors on the American 
side." 

The Canadas have rapidly improved since 
Durham wrote, galvanized into action chiefly 



164 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

by American example and energy, and the 
larger freedom they now enjoy ; but what 
might not their development be if wholly 
emancipated and republicanized ? Or, still 
more, in respect to the silent and barren regi- 
ons of the southern continent, what magical 
transformations a change of political relations 
would evoke I The rich wastes given over to 
the vulture and the serpent — where the sun- 
shine and air of the most delicious climate fall 
upon a desolation — would blossom and put 
forth like the golden-fruited Hesperides, open- 
ing a glorious asylum to the over-crowded 
labor of southern Europe ; the immense rivers, 
which now hear no sound, save their own com- 
plaining moan as they woo in vain the churlish 
banks that spurn their offers of service, would 
then laugh with ships, and go rejoicing to th^ 
sea ; the palsy-smitten villages, broken into 
pieces before they are built, would teem like 
hives with " singing-masons building golden 
eaves ;" and the scarcely human societies, lep- 
rous with indolence, or alternately benumbed 
by despotism, or convulsed by wild, anarchical 
throes, would file harmoniously into order, and, 



ANNEXATION. 165 

like enchanted armies, when the spells of the 
sorcerers are gone, take up a march of tri- 
umph : 

" Such power there is Iq heavcDly polity." 

Nor would the incorporation of these foreign 
ingredients into our body — we mean by regular 
and pacific methods, by a normal and organic 
assimilation, and not by any extraneous force 
or fraud — swell us out to an unmanageable and 
plethoric size. It is the distinctive beauty of 
our political structure, rightly interpreted, that 
it admits of an almost indefinite extension of 
the parts without detriment to the whole. In 
the older nations, where the governments as- 
sume to do everything, an increase of dimen- 
sions is always accompanied by an increase of 
danger — the head is unable to control the ex- 
"tremities, which fly off into a St. Vitus's dance 
of revolution, or the extremities are paralyzed, 
through a congestion of despotic power in the 
head. But with us there is no such liability : 
the political power, dispersed and localized, the 
currents of influence pass reciprocally from the 
centre to the circumference, and from the cir- 



166 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

cumference to the centre, as in the ch'culation 
of the blood ; and whether the number of 
members in the system be more or less, the re- 
lations of strength between them and the head 
remain pretty much the same ; or, rather, as 
our federal force is the net result and quotient 
of the contributions of the separate states, it 
is rather strengthened than weakened by the 
addition of new elements. Our circle of thirty- 
one integers works as harmoniously as it did 
when it was composed of only thirteen, while 
the probability of rupture is lessened, from the 
greater number which are interested in the 
Union. A powerful community, like New York 
or Ohio, might have its own way opposed to 
a mere handful of smaller communities ; but 
opposed to a vast network of communities, 
though never so small in themselves, it would 
be compelled to listen to reason. Indeed, the 
dangers likely to arise in the practical workings 
of our system will result from an excessive 
centripetal, rather than centrifugal, tendency, 
and the annexation of new states is, therefore, 
one of the best correctives of the vice. 

But be that as it may, it is clear that we 



ANNEXATION. 167 

must maintain some relations to the other na- 
tions of the world, either under the existing 
international law, or by treaty, or else by regu- 
lar constitutional agreement. Now, which of 
the three is the best? International law, as 
we all know, is the merest figment in practice, 
proverbially uncertain in its principles, without 
sanctions or penalties, and wholly ineffective 
when it conflicts with the will of powerful 
states, of which fact the whole continent of 
Europe is witness. Treaties of amity and com- 
merce are often only temporary, and may be 
abrogated at the option of the parties to them, 
or openly violated, when one of the parties is 
strong and unscrupulous. But a constitutional 
union, an eternal and brotherly league of inde- 
pendent and equal sovereignties, is the most 
permanent, peaceful, and unoppressive in which 
states can be joined — the wisest, strongest, and 
hajipiest relation that can be instituted among 
civilized nations. 

The fears, therefore, that some express at 
our assumed velocity and breadth of expansion, 
are ill-founded, unmanly, and un-American. 
If we ever had swept, or were likely to sweep 



168 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

over the earth, sirocco-wise, drinking the dews, 
withering the grass, blearing the eyes of men, 
or blistering their bodies, there would then be 
some excuse for such apprehensions ; if we 
proposed, as a few insane propagandists do, to 
carry the slavery of the southern states abroad, 
to blight, by its pestilent influences, the golden 
tropics ; or, if in the might and intensity of the 
centrifugal impulse there were danger of dislo- 
cating our own system, whirling the fragments 
off into measureless space, it would become the 
character of every patriot to shout a halt. But 
Caucasians as we are, carrying the best blood 
of time in our veins — Anglo-Saxons, the inherit- 
ors of the richest and profoundest civiliza- 
tions : Puritans, wiiose religion is their most 
imperishable conviction : native Ytinkees of in- 
domitable enterprise, and a capacity for govern- 
ment and self-government, which masters every 
element — the effeminacy of climate, the mad- 
ness of gold-hunting, the spite and rage of seas 
and winds — we go forth as a beneficent, not a 
destructive agency ; as the bearers of life, not 
death, to the prostrate nations — to the over- 
ripe or the under-ripe alike — to all who lie on 



ANNEXATION. 169 

the margins of Bethesda, waiting for the good 
strong arm to thrust them in the invigorating 
pool. 

Precisely, however, because this tendency to 
the assimilation of foreign ingredients, or to 
the putting forth of new members, is an inevi- 
table incident of our growth — because, too, of 
the manifest advantages to all concerned — there 
is no need that it should be specially fostered 
or stimulated. It will thrive of itself: it will 
supply the fuel of its own fires ; and all that it 
requires is only a wise direction. A masterly 
inactivity is here emphatically the rule ; for it 
will better secure us the desired result than 
the noisy, proselytizing, buccaneeriaig zeal of 
over-hasty demagogues. The fruit will fall 
into our hands when it is ripe, without an offi- 
cious shaking of the tree. Cuba will be ours, 
and Canada and Mexico, too — if we want them 
— in due season, and without the wicked imper- 
tinence of a war. Industry, commerce, silent 
migrationsj the winning example of high pros- 
perity, and of a freedom which sports like the 
winds around an Order which is as firm as the 

Pyramids, are grappling them by unseen ties, 
8 



170 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

and drawing them closer each day, and binding 
them in a unity of intercourse, of interest and 
of friendship, from which they will soon find it 
impossible to break, if they would, and from 
which, also, very soon, they would not break 
if they could. Let us, then, await patiently the 
dowries of time, whose promises are so com- 
placent and decided, 

" Nor weave witli bloody Lands the tissue of our line." 

It should be, moreover, always borne in 
mind, as the truth most certain of all the truths 
that have been demonstrated by the experience 
of nations, that their home policy, their do- 
mestic relations, their internal development, the 
concentration, not the dispersion, of their 
energies, are the objects to which they should 
devote their first and last, most earnest and 
best regards. It is the most miserable and 
ruinous of all ambitions which leads nations 
into dreams of external domination and power. 
The wars they engender, deadly as they 
may be, are comparatively nothing to the 
sapping drains and sluices they open in 
the whole body, and every limb and mom- 



ANNEXATION. 171 

ber of the state. *' Ships, colonies, and com- 
merce," has been the cry of the Old World 
cabinets, and the effects are seen in bankrupt- 
cies, in Pelions-upon-Ossas of debt, in rotten 
courts, in degraded and impoverished peoples, 
and in oppressed and decaying neighbor- 
nations. 

France, for instance, instead of giving a 
chance to her thirty-six millions of lively and 
industrious people, to recover and enrich their 
soils, to open roads, to make navigable their 
streams, and to build themselves up in know- 
ledge and virtue, has ever been smitten with an 
insane love of foreign influence ; but might 
rather have been smitten with the plague. She 
has overrun and ruined Lombardy ; she has 
overrun and paralyzed, if not ruined, the Ne- 
therlands and Holland ; she has overrun and 
arrested the civilization of Catalonia ; she has 
overrun and deeply wounded Belgium ; slie has 
been the perpetual enemy of the free cities of 
Germany, stirring up thirty years war, and as- 
sisting Austria in infamous schemes of destruc 
tion ; she has invaded Genoa, Sicily, Venice, 
Corsica, Rome, suppressing them time and 



172 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

again with" her armies ; she hangs like a night- 
mare upon Algeria ; she maintains penal colo- 
nies at Guiana — and all with what gain to 
herself? With what gain ? Look at the semi- 
barbarism of her almost feudal rural popula- 
tion ; at the ignorance, licentiousness, and 
crime of her cities ; at her vast agricultural 
resources, not only not developed, but laden 
with, taxes and debt ; at her unstable govern- 
ments, shifting like the forms of a kaleidoscope ; 
at her Jacqueries, her St. Bartholomews, her 
dragonades, her Coiqis cfEtat ; her fusiladed 
legislators, and her exiled men of science, and 
her poets ! France, under a true decentralized 
freedom, with the amazing talents of her cpiick- 
witted and amiable people, left to the construc- 
tion of their own fortunes, might now have 
been a century in advance of where she is ; but 
she followed the ignis fatuus of glory, of power 
abroad instead of industry and peace at home ! 
England, too, in spite of her noble qualities 
and gigantic industry, has depopulated Ireland, 
starved India, ruined her West India islands, 
and half hamstrung the Canadas, in order to 
make distant markets for her trade, and yai, her 



ANNEXATION. 173 

poor at home are imbruted, half-starved, earn- 
ing only one-tenth of what they might for her, 
while younger and freer nations are enticing 
away the commerce of the very dependencies 
which it has taken whole generations of wrong, 
torture, and bloodshed to create ! 

On the other hand, the United States, re- 
fraining from the spoliation of her neighbors, 
devoting herself steadily to the tasks of indus- 
try set before her, welcoming the people of all 
nations, poor and rich, restricting government 
to its simplest duties, securing every man by 
equal laws, and giving to every citizen oppor- 
tunities of honor, fortune, self-culture — has, in 
a short fifty years, overtaken the most advanced 
nations, has left the others far in the rear, and, 
in less than ten years from the date at which 
we write, will take her stand as the first nation 
of the earth — without a rival — without a peer, 
as we hope without an enemy — but, whether 
with or without enemies, able, single-handed, 
to dictate her terms, on any question, to a leash 
of the self-seeking and decrepit monarchies of 
Europe. By not aiming at foreign aggrandize- 
ment, of which she is so often recklessly ac- 



174 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

cused, she has reached a position which puts 
it easily in her power. Her strength has been 
in her weakness ; her ability to cope with the 
world has grown out of her unwillingness to 
make the attempt ; and behold her now a mag- 
nificent example of the good effects of peace, 
justice, and hard work. God grant that she 
may never find occasion to walk in the devious 
paths of intrigue, or to raise the battle-cry of 
invasion ; and God grant, too — we ask it with 
a double earnestness — that she may not, in her 
prosperity, forget those that are in adversity ; 
that she may never take part with the oppres- 
sor, but give her free hand of sympathy to the 
oppressed, whenever and wherever they shall 
undertake the struggle for their rights ! 
February, 1854. 



"AMERICA FOR THK AMERICANS." 

Ax individual, masked under the vulgar 
name of Sam, furnishes just now a good deal 
more than half the pabulum wherewith certain 
legislators and journalists are fed. Whether he 
is a mythical or real personage — a magus or a 
monkey — nobody seems to know ; but we are 
inclined to regard him as real, because of his 
general acceptance among Dalgetty politicians, 
and because of the irresistible merriment his 
occasional " coming down" on something or 
other affords the newspapers. We saw a 
paunchy old gentleman the other day, with a 
face like the sun, only more red and blue and 
spotty, and a dismally-wheezy voice, who came 
near being carried off with a ponderous apo- 
plectic chuckle, which seized him when some- 
body casually observed that " Sam was pitching 
into the police," and he was only relieved from 
the fatal consequences by a series of desperate 



176 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

movements which resembled those of a seventy- 
four getting under-way again after the sudden 
stroke of a typhoon. Now, if Sam was not 
unquestionably a real personage, and this old 
gentleman unquestionably a real disciple of his, 
we are at a loss to account for the reality of the 
phenomena thus exhibited. 

But whether real or mythical, it has been 
impossible for us to raise our admiration of Sam 
to the popular pitch. After due and diligent 
inquiry, we have arrived at only a moderate 
estimate of his qualities. In fact, considering 
the mystery in which he shrouds his ways, we 
are disposed to believe that he is more of a 
Jerry Sneak than a hero. The assumption of 
secresy on the part of any one, naturally starts 
our suspicions. We cannot see why he should 
resort to it, if he harbors onl}^ just or generous 
designs. We associate darkness and night with 
things that are foul, and we admire the saying, 
that twilight even, though a favorite with 
lovers, is also favorable to thieves. Schemes 
which shrink from the day, which skulk behind 
corners, and wriggle themselves into obscure 
and crooked places, are not the schemes we 



"AMERICA FOR THE AMERICANS." 177 

love at a venture. And all the veiled prophets, 
we apprehend, are very much like that one we 
read of in the palace of Merou, who hid his face, 
as he pretended to his admirers, because its 
brightness would strike them dead, but in 
reality because it was of an ugliness so mon- 
strous that no one could look upon it and 
live. 

There is an utterance, however, imputed to 
this impervious and oracular Sam, which we 
cordially accept. He is said to have said that 
*' America belongs to Americans" — just as his 
immortal namesake, Sam Patch, said that 
" some things could be done as well as others" 
— and we thank him for the concession. It is 
good, very good, very excellent good — as the 
logical Touchstone would have exclaimed — pro- 
vided you put a proper meaning to it. 

What is America, and who are Americans ? 
It all depends upon that, and, accordingly as 
you answer, will the phrase appear very wise 
or very foolish. If you are determined to con- 
sider America as nothing more than the two or 
three million square miles of dirt, included be- 
tween the Granite Hills and the Pacific, and 



178 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

Americans as those men exclusively whose 
bodies happened to be fashioned from it, we 
fear that you have not penetrated to the real 
beauty and significance of the terms. The soul 
of a muck-worm may very naturally be con- 
tented with identifying itself with the mould 
from which it is bred, and into which it will 
soon be resolved; but the soul of a man, unless 
we are hugely misinformed, claims a loftier 
origin, and looks forward to a nobler destiny. 

America, in our sense of the word, embraces 
a complex idea. It means not simply the soil, 
with its coal, cotton, and corn, but the nation- 
ality by which that soil is occupied, and the 
political system in which such occupants are 
organized. The soil existed long before Ves- 
pucci gave it a name — as long back, it may be, 
as when " the morning stars sang together" — 
but the true America, a mere chicken still, dates 
from the last few years of the eighteenth cen- 
tury. It picked its shell for the first time amid 
the cannon-volleys of Bunker Hill, and gave its 
first peep when the old State House bell at 
Philadelphia rang out "liberty to all the land." 
Before that period, the straggling and depend- 



"AMERICA FOR THE AMERICANS." 179 

ent colonies which were here w^ere the mere 
spawn of the older nations — the eggs and em- 
bryos of America, but not the fully-fledged bird. 
It was not until the political constitution of 
'89 had been accepted by the people that 
America attained a complete and distinctive 
existence, or that she w\as able — continuing the 
figure with which we began — to spread her 
" sheeny vans," and shout a cock-a-doodle to 
the sun. 

It would be needless, at this day, to state 
what are the distinguishing principles of that 
political existence. They have been pro- 
nounced ten thousand times, and resumed as 
often in the simple formula w^hich every school- 
boy knows — the government of the w^hole peo- 
ple by themselves and for themselves. In other 
words, America is the democratic republic — not 
the government of the people by a despot, nor 
by an oligarchy, nor by any class, such as the 
red-haired part of the inhabitants, or the blue- 
eyed part ; nor yet a government for any other 
end than the good of the entire nation — but the 
•democratic republic, pure and simple. This is 
the political organism which individualizes us. 



180 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

or separates us as a living unity from all the 
rest of the world. 

All this, of course, would be too elementary 
to be recounted in any mature discussion, if re- 
cent events had not made it necessary to an 
adequate answer of our second question — who, 
then, are Americans? Who constitute the 
people, in whose hands the destinies of America 
are to be deposited? 

The fashionable answer in these times is, 
" the natives of this Continent, to be sure !" 
But let us ask again, in that case, whether our 
old friends Uncas and Chingachgook, and Kag- 
ne-ga-bow-wow — whether Walk-in-the-water, 
and Talking-snake, and Big-yellow-thunder, 
are to be considered Americans par-excellence ? 
Alas, no ! for they, poor fellows ! are all trudg- 
ing towards the setting sun, and soon their red 
and dusky figures will have faded in the darker 
shadows of the night. Is it, then, the second 
generation of natives — they who are driving 
them away — who compose exclusively the 
American family ? You say, yes ; but we say, 
no ! Because if America be, as we have shown, 
more than the soil of America, w^e do not see 



"AMERICA FOR THE AMERICANS." 181 

how a mere cloddy derivation from it entitles 
one to the name of American. Clearly, that 
title cannot enure to us from the mere argilla- 
ceous or silicious compounds of our bodies — 
clearly, it descends from no vegetable ancestry 
—clearly, it must disdain to trace itself to that 
simple relationship to physical nature which 
we chance to enjoy, in common with the skunk, 
the rattlesnake, and the catamount. All these 
are only the natural productions of America — 
excellent, no doubt, in their several ways — but 
the American man is something more than a 
natural product — boasting a moral or spiritual 
genesis, and referring his birth-right to the 
immortal thoughts, which are the soul of his 
institutions', and to the divine affections, which 
lift his politics out of the slime of state-craft, 
into the air of great humanitary purposes. 

The real American, then, is he — no matter 
whether his corporeal chemistry was first ig- 
nited in Kamschatka or the moon — who, aban- 
doning every other country, and forswearing 
every other allegiance, gives his mind and heart 
to the grand constituent ideas of the republic — 
to the impulses and ends in which and by which 



182 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

alone it subsists. If he have arrived at years 
of discretion — if he produces evidence of a ca- 
pacity to understand the relations he undertakes 
— if he has resided in the atmosphere of free- 
dom long enough to catch its genuine spirit — 
then is he an American, in the true and best 
sense of the term. 

Or, if not an American, pray what is he ? An 
Englishman, a German, an Irishman, he can no 
longer be ; he has cast off the slough of his old 
political relations forever ; he has asserted his 
sacred right of expatriation (which the United 
States was the first of nations to sanction), or 
been expatriated by his too ardent love of the 
cause which the United States represents ; and 
he can never return to the ancient fold. It 
would spurn him more incontinently than pow- 
der spurns the fire. He must become, then, 
either a wanderer and a nondescript on the face 
of the earth, or be received into our generous 
republican arms. It is our habit to say that we 
know of no race nor creed, but the race of man 
and the creed of democracy, and if he appeals 
to us as a man and a democrat, there is no al- 
ternative in the premises. We must either 



"AMERICA FOR THE AMERICANS." 183 

deny his claims altogether — deny that he is a 
son of God and our brother — or else we must 
incorporate him, in due season, into the house- 
hold. It is not enough that we offer him shel- 
ter from the rain — not enough that we mend 
his looped and windowed raggedness — not 
enough that we replenish his wasted midriff 
with bacon and hominy, and open to his palsied 
hands an opportunity to toil. These are com- 
mendable charities, but they are such charities 
as any one, not himself a brute, would willingly 
extend to a horse found astray on the common. 
Shall we do no more for our fellows? Have 
we discharged our whole duty, as men to men, 
when we have avouched the sympathies we 
would freely render to a cat? Do we, in truth, 
recognize their claims at all, when we refuse to 
confess that higher nature in them, whereby 
alone they are men, and not stocks or animals? 
More than that : do w^e not, by refusing to con- 
fess a man's manhood, in reality heap him with 
the heaviest injury it is in our power to inflict, 
and wound him with the bitterest insult his 
spirit can receive ? 

We can easily conceive the justness with 



184 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

which an alien, escaping to our shores from the 
oppressions of his own country, or voluntarily 
abandoning it for the sake of a better life, 
might reply to those who receive him hospita- 
bly, but deny him political association : — " For 
your good- will, I thank you — for the privilege 
of toiling against the grim inclemencies of my 
outcast and natural condition, which you offer, 
I thank you — for the safeguard of your noble 
public laws, I thank you ; but the blessed God 
having made me a man, as well as you — when 
you refuse me, like the semi-barbarians of 
Sparta, all civil life — when, with Jewish ex- 
clusiveness, you thrust me out of the holy 
temple, as a mere proselyte of the gate — your- 
intended kindnesses scum over into malignity, 
and the genial wune-cup you proffer brims 
with wormwood and gall." 

We are well aware of the kind of outcry 
w^ith which such reasoning is usually met. We 
know in what a variety of tones — from the 
vulgar growl of the pot-house pugilist to the 
minatory shriek of the polemic, frenzied with 
fear of the Scarlet Lady — it is proclaimed that 
all foreiarn infusions into our life are venomous, 



185 

and ought to be vehemently resisted. Nor do 
we mean to deny the right of every communi- 
ty to protect itself from hurt, even to the forci- 
ble extrusion, if necessary, of the ingredients 
which threaten its damage. But that necessi- 
ty must be most distinctly proved. The case 
must be one so clear as to leave no doubt of it, 
as an absolute case of self-defense. Now, 
there is no such overruling necessity with us, 
as 'to compel either the exclusion, or the ex- 
trusion, of oar alien residents. They are not 
such a violent interpohition, as when grains of 
sand, to use Coleridge's figure, have got be- 
tween the sliell and the flesh of the snail — 
that they will kill us if we do not put them 
out and keep them out. A prodigious hue and 
cry against them wakes the echoes of the 
vicinage just now, such as is raised when a 
pack of hungry foxes stray into the honest 
hen-roost, but the clamor is quite dispropor- 
tionate to the occasion. The foxes are by no 
means so numerous or predacious as they are 
imagined to be, and there is no such danger of 
them for the future that we need to be trans- 
fixed with fright, or scamper away in a stam- 



186 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

pede of panic terror. The evils which our 
past experience of Naturalization has made 
known to us — for there are some — are not un- 
manageable evils, requiring a sudden and spas- 
modic remedy, and menacing a disastrous over- 
throw unless they are instantly tackled. The 
most of them are like the other evils of our 
social condition — mere incidents of an infantile 
or transitional state — of a life not yet arrived 
at full maturity — and will be worked off in the 
regular course of things. At any rate, they 
solicit no headstrong, desperate assault ; only 
a consciousness of what and where our real 
strength is, and patient self-control. 

On the other hand, it is a fixed conviction 
of ours, in respect to this whole subject of 
aliens — that there is much less danger in ac- 
cepting them as citizens, under almost any cir- 
cumstances, than there would be in attempting 
to keep them out. In the latter case, by separat- 
incf them from the common life of the commu- 
nity — making them amenable to laws for which 
they are yet not responsible — taxing them for 
the support of a government in which they are 
not represented — calling upon them for pur- 



" AMERICA FOR THE AMERICANS," 187 

poses of defense when they have no real coun- 
try to defend — we should in effect erect them 
into a distinct and subordinate class, on which 
we had fastened a very positive stigma, or 
degradation. How lamentable and inevitable 
the consequences of such a social contrast ! 

The reader, doubtless, has often seen a 
wretched oak by the way-side, whose trunk is 
all gnarled and twisted into knots ; or he may 
have passed through the wards of a hospital, 
where beautiful human bodies are eaten with 
ulcers and sores ; or he may have read of 
the Pariahs of India, those vile and verminous 
outcasts, who live in hovels away from the 
cities, and ^Drey on property like rats and wea- 
sels ; or, again, chance may have led him 
through the Jews' quarters, the horrid ghettos 
of the old continental towns, w^here squalor 
accompanies inefllible crime ; or, finally, his 
inquiries may have made him familiar with the 
free blacks of his own country, with their hope- 
less degradations and miseries ! Well, if these 
experiences have been his, he has discerned in 
them the exponents — in some, the symbols, and 
in others, the actual effects — of the terrible 



188 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

spirit of exclusion, when it is worked out in 
society. For, it is a universal truth, that 
whatever thing enjoys but a partial participa- 
tion of the life to which it generically belongs, 
gets, to the extent of the deprivation, diseased. 
It is also as universal a truth, that the spread 
of that disease will, sooner or later, affect the 
more living members. Make any class of men, 
for instance, an exception in society ; set them 
apart in a way which shall exclude them from 
the more vital circulations of that society ; 
place them in relations wliich shall breed in 
them a sense of alienation and of degradation 
at the same time — and they must become 
either blotches or parasites, wdiich corrupt it ; 
or else a band of conspirators, more or less ac- 
tive, making war upon its integrity. Let us 
suppose that some ruler, a Louis Napoleon, or 
Dr. Francia, should decree that all the inhabit- 
ants of a certain country, of oblique or defect- 
ive vision, should be rigidly confined to one 
of the lower mechanical occupations; would 
not all the squint-eyed and short-sighted peo- 
ple be immediately degraded in the estimation 
of the rest of the community ? Would not 



"AMERICA FOR THE AMERICANS." 189 

the feeling of that debasement act as a perpet- 
ual irritant to their malice — lead them to hate 
the rest, and to prey upon them — and so feed 
an incessant feud — open or sinister, as the in- 
jured party might be strong or weak — between 
the strabismic families and those of a more 
legitimate ocularity ? In the same way, but 
with even more certainty and virulence of ef- 
fect, any legal distinctions among a people, 
founded upon differences of birth or race, must 
generate unpleasant and pernicious relations, 
which, in the end, could only be maintained by 
force. Say to the quarter million of foreigners 
who annually arrive on our shores, that like 
the mctoiltoi and ijcrioilwi of the Greeks, they 
may subsist here, but nothing more ; that the 
privileges of the inside of the city, suffrage, 
office, equality, ambition, are closed to them ; 
that they may sport for our amusement in the 
arenas, look on at our courts, do our severer la- 
bors for us, and reverently admire our great- 
ness ; but that they shall have no part nor lot 
in that political life which is the central and 
distinguishing life of the nation ; and, so far 
forth, you convert them, infallibly, into ene- 



190 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

mies — into the worst kind of enemies, too — 
because internal enemies, who have already ef- 
fected a lodgment in the midst of your citadel. 
Coming as an invading army — these thousands 
— with avowed unfriendly purposes — they 
might easily be driven back by our swords : 
but coming here to settle and be transmuted 
into a caste — into political lepers and vaga- 
bonds — they would degenerate into a moral 
plague, which no human weapon could turn 
away. Proscribed from the most important 
functions of the society in which they lived, 
they would cherish an interest separate from 
the general interest, and, as they grew stronger, 
form themselves into an organized and irritable 
clanship. Their just resentments, or their in- 
creasing arrogance, would sooner or later pro- 
voke some rival faction into conflict ; and then 
the deep-seated, fatal animosities of race and 
religion, exasperated by the remembrance of 
injuries given and taken, would rage over so- 
ciety like the winds over the sea. 

History is full of warnings to us on this 
head. No causes were more potent, in sunder- 
ing the social ties of the ancient nations, than 



"AMERICA FOR THE AMERICANS." 191 

the fierce civil wars which grew out of the 
narrow policy of restricting citizenship to the 
indigenous races. No blight has fallen with 
more fearful severity on Europe than the blight 
of class domination, which, for centuries, has 
wasted the energies and the virtues, the happi- 
ness and the hopes, of the masses. Nor is 
there any danger that threatens our ow^n coun- 
try now — scarcely excepting slavery — more 
subtile or formidable than the danger which 
lurks in those ill-suppressed hatreds of race and 
religion, which some persons seem eager to 
foment into open quarrel. Already the future 
is walking in to-day. The recent disgraceful 
exhibitions in this city — the armed and hostile 
bands which are known to be organized — the 
bitter taunts and encounters of their leaders — 
the low criminations of the Senate-house — the 
pugilistic melee, ending in death — the instant 
and universal excitement — the elevation of a 
bully of the bar-room into the hero of a cause 
— the imposing funeral honors, rivaling in pa- 
geantry and depth of emotion the most solemn 
obsequies that a nation could decree its noblest 
benefactor — all these are marks of a soreness 



192 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

which needs only to be irritated to suppurate 
in social war. 

Our statesmen at Washington are justly sens- 
ible of the dangers of sectional divisions ; but 
no sectional divisions which it is possible to 
arouse are half so much to be dreaded as an in- 
flamed and protracted contest between natives 
and aliens, or Catholics and Protestants. The 
divisions which spring from territorial interests 
appeal to few of the deeper passions of the 
soul ; but the divisions of race and religion 
touch a chord in the human heart which vi- 
brates to the intensest malignity of hell. Ac- 
cordingly, the pen of the historian registers 
many brutal antagonisms, many Uisting and 
terrible wars ; but the most brutal of all those 
antagonisms, the most lasting and terrible of 
all those wars, are the antagonisms of race, and 
the wars of religion. 

It will be replied to what we have hitherto 
urged, that our argument proceeds upon the 
imputation, that aliens are to be totally ex- 
cluded from political life ; w^iereas, nobody 
proposes such a thing, but only a longer pre- 
paratory residence. 



"AMERICA FOR THE AMERICANS." 193 

We rejoin, that the persons and parties who 
are now agitating the general question, because 
they propose the exclusion of adopted citizens 
from office, do, in effect, propose a total politi- 
cal disqualification of foreigners. All their in- 
vectives, all their speeches, all their secret 
assemblages, have this end and no other. They 
agree to ostracize politically every man who is 
not born on our soil ; they conspire not to 
nominate, to any preferment, not to vote for, 
any candidate who is born abroad ; and these 
agreements and conspiracies are a present dis- 
franchisement, so far as they are effective, of 
every adopted citizen, and a future anathema 
of every alien. Whether the aim be accom- 
pHshed by public opinion, by secret conclave, 
or by law, the consequences are the same ; and 
the general objections we have alleged, to the 
division of society into castes, apply with equal 
force. 

We rejoin again — in respect to the distinc- 
tion made between a total exclusion of foreign- 
ers, and a change in tlie naturalization laws — 
that it is a distinction which really amounts to 

nothing. For, firstly, if the probation be ex- 
y 



194 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

tended to a long period, say twenty-one years 
as some recommend, it would be equivalent to 
a total exclusion; and, secondly, if a shorter 
period, say ten years, h^ adopted, the change 
would be unimportant, because no valid objec- 
tion against the present term of five years 
would thereby be obviated. Let us see, for a 
moment. 

Firstly, as to a term of twenty-one years : 
we say that, inasmuch as the majority of for- 
eigners who arrive on our shores are twenty- 
five years of age and over, when they arrive, if 
we impose a quarantine of twenty-one years 
more, they will not be admitted as citizens un- 
til they shall have reached an age when the 
tardy boon will be of little value to them, and 
when their faculties and their interests in hu- 
man affairs will have bes^un to decline. Whether 
they will care to solicit their right at that pe- 
riod is doubtful, and, if they do, they can re- 
gard it as scarcely more than a mockery. How 
many of them will live to be over forty-five 
or fifty years of age, if we leave them in the 
interval to loiter in the grog-shops, and amid 
scenes of vice, as they are more likely to do if 



"AMERICA FOR THE AMERICANS." 195 

not absorbed into the mass of citizens ? How 
many, having passed twenty-one years of po- 
litical ban, and even of ignominy — for it would 
come to that — would be thereby better pre- 
pared for adoption? The younger ranks of the 
emigrants might possibly benefit by the hope 
of one day becoming citizens, and look forward 
to it with some degree of interest ; but to all 
the restit would be a fata morgana^ and the 
protracted test virtually an interdiction. 

Secondlyj as to any shorter novitiate, say ten 
or twelve years, it would not be more effective, 
in the way of qualifying the pupil, than the 
existing term. As the laws now stand, an alien, 
giving three years' notice of intention, must 
have been five years consecutively a resident 
of the United States, and one year a resident 
of the State and County in which he applies — 
must be of good moral character — must be at- 
tached to our constitution and laws — must ab- 
jure all foreign powers, particularly that he 
was subject to — and must swear faithful alle- 
giance to the government of his adoptive coun- 
try — before he can be admitted a member of 
the State. What more could be exacted of 



196 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

him, at the end of ten years, or twenty? If 
unfit for acceptance — according to these re- 
quirements — at the end of five years, would 
he be more likely to be fit at the end of ten ? 
In short, is there a single disqualification, 
which zealous nativists are apt to allege against 
foreigners — such as their ignorance, their clan- 
nishness, their attachment to foreign govern- 
ments, and their subjection to the Roman 
Catholic Church — which would be probably 
alleviated by means of a more protracted em- 
bargo ? None ; on the contrary, as we have 
intimated in another place, all their worse 
qualities would be aggravated by the exclusive 
association among themselves for so many years 
longer, in which they would be kept — while 
they would lose, as we shall show more fully 
hereafter, the best means of fitting themselves 
for good citizenship, in losing the educational 
influences of our actual political life. 

It is true, in respect to the present laws of 
naturalization, that our courts have shown a 
baneful laxity in enforcing their conditions, and 
that our leading parties, corrupt everywhere, 
are nowhere more corrupt than in their modes 



"AMERICA FOR THE AMERICANS." 197 

of naturalizing foreigners ; but there is no rea- 
son to expect that either courts or parties will 
grow more severe under more stringent laws. 
They will have the same motives, and be just 
as eager, to license fraudulent voters then as 
they are now ; and the few days before a great 
Presidential election will exhibit the same dis- 
graceful scenes of venality and falsehood. No 
simple change in the time of the law, at any 
rate, can work any improvement. Nor will such 
a change render it any more difficult for the 
dishonest alien to procure the franchise. He 
can just as easily swear to a long residence as 
a short one ; while it will happen, that the 
rarer we make the privilege, the more we in- 
crease the difficulties of access to it, the longer 
we postpone the minority, the greater will be 
bis inducements to evade the law. In propor- 
tion as a prize becomes more valuable, the 
temptations to a surreptitious seizure of it in- 
crease ; but where an end is easily achieved, 
the trouble of waiting till it be obtained in the 
regular way is preferred to the hazards of a 
clandestine or criminal attempt to carry it 
off. 



198 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

Besides, it is a puerile piece of injustice to- 
wards the alien, to inflict him with a disability 
because of our own laches. We have failed to 
administer our laws as they should be, and, ex- 
periencing some injury in consequence, we turn 
round to abuse the foreigner, like a foolish and 
petulant boy who kicks the stone over wiiich 
he stumbled. The more magnanimous as well 
as sensible course w^ould be, to amend our own 
faults. Let us make the five years of proba- 
tion what the courts may easily make them, by 
rigidly exacting the criterions of the law — an 
interval of real preparation for citizenship — 
and the present term will be found long enough. 
But whether long enough or not, the question 
of time, that is, whether it shall be five years 
or ten, is a simple question of internal police, 
not of lasting principles, to be determined by 
the facts of experience, and by no means justi- 
fying the virulent and wholesale denunciations 
of foreigners it is the fashion with some to ful- 
minate. 

In fact, the entire logic of the nativists is 
vitiated by its indiscriminating character. Be- 
cause a large number of the Irish, and a con- 



"AMERICA FOR THE AMERICANS." 199 

siderable number of the Germans, have been 
reduced, by the long years of abuse which they 
have suffered at home, to an inferior manhood, 
it is argued, that all the rest of the Germans 
and the Irish, and all the Swiss, English, French, 
Scotch, Swedes, and Italians, must be made to 
suffer for it ; but what a grievous error ! The 
poor exiles and refugees, many of them, are, no 
doubt, sufficiently debased — some, even, exces- 
sively insolent, too — but among them are 
others who are not so — among them, are thou- 
sands upon thousands of men, of hardy virtues 
and clear intelligence, whose industry contri- 
butes vastly to the wealth, as their integrity 
does to the good order, of our society. Labor- 
ing like slaves for us, they have built our cities 
and railroads ; piercing the w^estern wilds, they 
have caused them to blossom into gardens ; 
taking part in our commerce and manufactures, 
they have helped to carry the triumphs of our 
arts to the remotest corners of the globe. It 
w^as from their ranks that our statesmanship re- 
cruited Gallatin, Morris, and Hamilton — that 
the Law acquired Rutledge, Wilson, and Em- 
met — that the Army w^on its Gates, its Mer- 



200 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

cer, and its Montgomeiy — the Navy its Jones, 
Blakeley, and Barry — the Arts their Sully, and 
Cole — Science, its Agassiz, and Guyot — Phi- 
lanthropy, its Eliot, and Benezet, and Religion 
its Witherspoon, its White, its Whitfield, and 
its Cheverus. 

The adopted citizen, no doubt, preserves a 
keen remembrance of his native land ; but 
" lives there on earth a soul so dead" as not to 
sympatliize in that feeling ? Let us ask you, 
oh patriotic Weissnicht, all fresh as you are 
from the vociferations of the lodge, whether 
you do at heart think the less of a man because 
he cannot wholly forget the play-place of his 
infancy — the friends and companions of his boy- 
hood — the old cabin in which he was reared — 
and the grave in which the bones of his honor- 
ed mother repose ? Have you never seen two 
long-separated friends, from the Old World, meet 
again in the New, and clasp each other in a 
warm embrace, while their conversation blos- 
somed up, from a vein of commom memory, in 

" Sweet household talk, and phrases of the hearth ;" 
and did you not love them the more, in that 



"AMERICA FOR THE AMERICANS." 201 

their eyes grew liquid with the dear old themes ? 
Or is there, in the whole circle of your large 
and respectable private acquaintance, a single 
Scotchman to whom you refLt«e your hand be- 
cause his affections melt under the " Auld lang 
syne" of Bums, or because his sides shake like 
a fallinGf house w4ien "Halloween" or "Tam 
O'Shanter" is read ? Can you blame even the 
poor Frenchman if his eyes light up into a kind of 
deathless glow, when the " Marseillaise," twist- 
ed from some wandering hurdy-gurdy, has yet 
power to recall the glorious days in which his 
fathers and brothers danced for liberty's sake 
and with gay audacity, towards the guillotine ? 
We venture to say for you, no 1 and we believe, 
if the truth w^ere told, that often, on the lonely 
western plains, you have dreamed over again 
with the German his sweet dream of the resur- 
rection and unity of the Fatherland. We have 
ourselves seen you at the St. George dinners, 
oh Weissnicht, swell with a very evident pride, 
when some flagrant Englishman, recounting, 
not the battles which his ancestors for ten cen- 
turies had won on every field of Europe, but 

the better trophies gained by Shakespeare, Mil- 
9* 



202 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

ton, Bacon, or Cromwell, told you that a little 
of that same blood coursed in your veins ! The 
tell-tale blood, as it tingled through your body 
and suffused your cheeks, confessed the fact, if 
your words did not ! How, then, can you, who 
gaze at Bunker Hill with tears in your eyes, 
and fling up your hat of a Fourth of July with 
a jerk that almost dislocates the shoulder, retire 
to your secret conclave, and chalk it up behind 
the door, against the foreigner, that he has a 
lingering love for his native country ? Why, he 
ought to be despised if he had not, if he could 
forget his heritages of old renown ; for it is this 
traditional tenderness, these genial memories of 
the immortal words, and deeds, and places, that 
constitute his patronymic glories, which show 
that he has a human heart still under his jacket, 
and is all the more likely, on account of it, to 
become a worthy American. Do not delude 
yourself, however, into the shallow belief that 
the aliens, because of these sentimental attach- 
ments, will be led into the love of their native 
governments, which, having plundered them 
and their class, for years, at last expelled 
them to our shores. Ah ! no — poor devils — 



"AMERICA FOR THE AMERICANS." 203 

they have not been so chucked under the chin, 
and fondled, and caressed, and talked pretty 
to, and fed with sweet-cakes, and humored in 
all sorts of self-indulgences, by the old despot- 
isms as to have fallen in love with them, forever 
and ever. On the contrary, if the reports are 
true, quite other endearments were showered 
upon them — such as cuffs and kicks — with a 
distinct intimation, besides, as Mr. Richard 
Swiveller said to Mr. Quilp, after pounding him 
thoroughly, that " there were plenty more in the 
same shop — a large and extensive assortment 
always on hand — and every order executed with 
promptitude and dispatch." Now, these are 
experiences that are apt to make republicans 
of men, and to fill them with other feelings 
than those of overweening attachment to their 
oppressors I 

But this is a slight digression, and we return 
to the main current of our argument, to say— 
what we esteem quite fatal to all schemes for 
excommunicating foreigners, or even greatly 
extending their minority — that the best way, 
on the whole, for making them good citizens, 
is to make them citizens. The evils of making 



204 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

them a class by themselves, we have already al- 
luded to, and we now speak, on the other hand, 
of the benefits which must accrue to them and 
to us from their absorption into the general life 
of the community. It is universally conceded 
by the liberal writers on government and socie- 
ty, that the signal and beneficent advantage of 
republican institutions (by which we mean an 
organized series of local self-governments) is, 
that their practical influences are so strongly 
educational. They train their subjects constantly 
into an increasing capacity for their enjoyment. 
In the old despotic nations — as we are all aware 
— where the State is one thing and the people 
another — the State is, in reality, a mere ma- 
chine of police, even in its educational and re- 
ligious provisions — maintaining a rigid order, 
but acting only externally on the people, whom 
it treats either as slaves or children. It 
does not directly develop the sense of responsi- 
bility in them, nor accustom them to self-con- 
trol and tlie exercise of their faculties. But in 
free commonwealths — which abhor this exces- 
sive centralizing tendency, and which distrib- 
ute power through subordinate municipalities, 



"AMERICA FOR THE AMERICANS." 205 

leaving the individual as much discretion as 
possible — the people are the state, and grow in- 
to each other as a kind of living unity. Thrown 
upon their own resources, they acquire quick- 
ness, skill, energy, and self-poise ; yet, made re- 
sponsible for the general interests, they learn 
to deliberate, to exercise judgment, to weigh 
the bearings of public questions, and to act in 
reference to the public welfare. At the same 
time, the lists of preferment being open to them, 
they cultivate the virtues and talents which 
will secure the confidence of their neighbors. 
Every motive of ambition and honoris address- 
ed to them, to improve their condition, and to 
perfect their endowments ; while a conscious- 
ness of their connection with the state, imparts 
a sense of personal worth and dignity. In prac- 
tice, of course, some show themselves insensi- 
ble to these considerations, but a majority do 
not. The consequence is, that the commonalty 
of the republic are vastly superior to the same 
classes abroad. Compare the farmers of our 
prairies to the boors of the Russian steppes, or 
to the peasants of the French valleys ! Or com- 
pare the great body of the working men in 



206 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

England with those of the United States ! Now, 
the American is not of a better nature than the 
European — for he is often of the same stock — 
nor is there any charm in our soil and climate 
unknown to the soil and climate of the other 
hemisphere ; but there is a difference in insti- 
tutions. Institutions, with us, are made for 
men, and not men for the institutions. It is 
the jury, the ballot-box, the free public assem- 
blage, the local committee, the legislative as- 
sembly, the place of trust, and, as a result of 
these, the school and the newspaper, which 
give such a spur to our activities, and endow 
us with such political competence. The actual 
responsibilities of civil life are our support 
and nutriment, and the wings wherewith we 

fly- 

If, consequently, you desire the foreigner to 
grow into a good citizen, you must subject him 
to the influences by which good citizens are 
made. Train him as you are yourselves trained, 
under the eftective tutelage of the regular rou- 
tine and responsibility of politics. He will 
never learn to swim by being kept out of the 
water, any more than a slave can become a 



" AMERICA FOR THE AMERICANS." 207 

freeman in slcavery. He gets used to independ- 
ence by the practice of it, as the child gets 
used to walking by walking. It is exercise 
alone which brings out and improves all sorts 
of fitnesses — social as well as physical — and the 
living of any life alone teaches us how it is to be 
best lived. Nor will any one work for an end in 
which he and his have no part. They only act 
for the community who are of the community. 
Outsiders are always riders. They stand or sit 
aloof. They have no special call to promote the 
internal thrift and order, which may get on as it 
can, for all them. But incorporate them into it, 
and it is as dear as the apple of their eye. Choose 
a person selectman of the village, and he con- 
ceives a paternal regard for it instantly, and 
makes himself wondrously familiar with its af- 
fairs, and their practical management. Show a 
rude fellow the possibility of a place in the po- 
lice, and he begins to think how important the 
execution of the law is. Hang the awful dig- 
nity of a seat on the justice's bench before the 
ambition of the country squire, and straight- 
way he looks as wise as Lord Eldon, and will 
strive to become so, rather than otherwise. 



208 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

How the prospect, too, of a winter at Albany 
or Washington stimulates all the local nota- 
bles into a capacity for it, as well as a desire. 
Thus, our whole political experience is an in- 
cessant instruction, and should no more be with- 
drawn from any class in society than the at- 
mosphere. It is prettily told, in that book of 
Eastern fables which delights our youth and 
enriches our manhood, that the father of Alad- 
din Abushamat, lest he should be hurt by the 
world, kept him under a trap-door, where he 
was visited only by two faithful slaves. But, 
pining and weary, the young man one day stole 
from his retreat, and running to his father, who 
was syndic of the merchants, said: '• Oh, my 
father, how shall I be able to manage the great 
wealth thou hast gained for me, if thou keepest 
me here in prison, and takest me not to the 
markets, where I may open a shop, and sit 
among the merchandise, buying and selling, and 
taking and giving ?" The father thought for 
awhile, and said: " True, my son ; the will of 
God be done ; I will take thee to the market- 
street and the shops," and we are told that Alad- 
din Abushamat became, though not without 



"AMERICA FOR THE AMERICANS.'* 20b 

some slips, a very rich man, as well as the right 
hand of the great Caliph, Haroun Alraschid, 
Prince of the Faithful, whose name be ever ex- 
alted ! 
May, 1855. 



SHOULD WE FEAR THE POPE? 

One cause of the current movement asfainst 
foreigners is, the hereditary aversion of Protest- 
ants to the Roman Church. It is alleged, that 
the doctrines of that Church assert the risrht of 
the Pope to interfere in the temporal affairs of 
kingdoms and states, while they demand for 
him the exclusive allegiance of its members ; 
and the inference is, that no one j)rofessing those 
doctrines can yield an honest allegiance to any 
other power. 

We propose to inquire how far these posi- 
tions are true ; and, if true, to what extent 
and in what way we ought to resist their dan- 
gers. 

Before doing so, it may be proper to premise, 
that we have not been educated to any over- 
weening estimate of the claims of the Catholic 
Church. On the contrary, all our studies and 
observations, as well as our general habits of 



SHOULD WE FEAR THE POPE? 211 

thought, have led us into convictions utterly 
hostile to its theories of government and its 
creeds. It seems to us a singular mixture of 
fanaticism, tyranny, cunning, and religion. Nor 
are we insensible of its many means of influ- 
ence, and of the vast prestige with which it 
addresses itself both to the imagination and rea- 
son of meu. Its venerable age, connecting it 
with the most ancient and splendid civilizations, 
Oriental, Grecian, Roman, and feudal, and sur- 
viving them all — its marvelous organization, 
combining the solidest strength with the most 
flexile activity, conciliating the wildest fanatical 
zeal with the coolest intellectual cunning, adapt- 
ing it to every age, nation, and exigency, and 
enabling it to pursue its designs with continu- 
ous and varied forces — its imposing ceremonies 
and pantomimes, which seem like mummery to 
the stranger, but to the initiated are signs of 
the mighty conquests it has achieved over the 
mythologies, the rites, and the persecutions 
of antiquity, as well as promises of the consol- 
ing grace which will again sustain it, should the 
hand of the enemy drive it once more into the 
catacombs and the caves — its luxurious patron- 



212 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

age of art, which has preserved to us so much 
of all that is best in the touching music, the 
lovely paintings, and the sublime cathedrals of 
the middle age — and, above all, the unques- 
tionable ability of its priests, with the long line 
of noble and beautiful spirits — Abelards, Pas- 
cals, and Fenelons — who have illustrated his- 
tory by their culture, their piety, and their 
genius — these are elements of greatness and 
power, which it would be folly as well as blind- 
ness in any one to overlook or deride. But, as 
we are convinced, also, that there are influences 
stronger than these — the influences of truth — 
of the soul of man — of the spirit of the age — of 
the providence of God, which has established a 
moral order in history, we are not dismayed by 
the amount of its ecclesiastical pretension, nor 
disheartened by any seeming facility or splendor 
in its temporary successes. 

Least of all, shall we allow ourselves to be 
betrayed, by the chronic terrors of Protestants, 
into an unjust judgment of Catholics, and the 
consequent perpetration of political wrong. We 
are too familiar with the history of religious con- 
troversy, to be hurried away by the furious zeal 



SHOULD WE FEAR THE POPE? 213 

of agitators, who regard it as their special mis- 
sion to arouse the world to a proper dread of 
the abuses of Popery. They are sincere, we 
have no doubt ; but it is the sincerity of parti- 
sans, not of judges. They have worked their 
impatience of error up to that inflammatory 
pitch, where conviction becomes passion. Of 
tolerable self-complacency and quietude, in 
other respects, they are apt tx) be shaken out of 
their shoes when the subject of the "Scarlet 
Woman" is broached. It has all the effect upon 
them — we say it with reverence — of the red rag 
upon some imperious turkey, who, straightway, 
loses his solemn port and dignity, and rushes 
wildly to the battle. 

Even the more temperate polemics, on the 
Protestant side of this controversy, do not al- 
ways restrain their ardor at judgment-heat. 
Having convinced themselves that Rome — not 
ecclesiasticism in general, but the particular 
branch of it called Rome — is the great Anti- 
Christ of Scripture, they incontinently belabor 
her with every variety of scriptural reproba- 
tion. All the monstrous types of apocalyptic 
zoology, the beasts with seven heads and ten 



214 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

horns, the red and black horses, the eagles, the 
calves, and the fiery flying serpents, are made 
to find in her their li\dng resemblance, while 
she is loudly proclaimed to be the man of per- 
dition, the mother of harlots, the mystic Baby- 
lon, who makes the nations " drunk with the 
wine of the wrath of her fornications."* 

It happens, unfortunately for the Church, 
that it is not difficult to give plausibility to 
these views, and, to some extent, a justification « 
of such reactionary hatreds, from the records 
of history. Ecclesiastical annals (and the same 
is true, perhaps, of all other annals), tried by 
the standard of existing opinions, are so full of 
whatever is insolent in assumption, corrupt in 
morals, cunning and treacherous in fraud, and 
detestable in tyranny, that a mere tyro, with a 
case to make out, might draw pictures from 
them that would frighten a college of cardinals, 
and much more a conclave of credulous zealots. 
Dip into tliese annals anywhere, but especially 

* In this application, however, of the great symbols of the 
Apocalypse to actual events, instead of spiritual truths, they 
have the ilhistrious precedent of Dante, Petrarch, ]\Iachia- 
velli, and some, even, who lived in the previous century. 



SHOULD WE FEAR THE POPE? 215 

into what relates to the doings from the ninth 
to the fifteenth centuries, and how much wick- 
edness of every kind you meet ! What au- 
dacity, licentiousness, superstition, ignorance, 
fraud, uproar, and cruel ferocity of persecu- 
tion ! The dread power of the Papacy seems 
to bestride those ages like a gigantic spectre 
of the Brocken. It rises before us as some- 
thing awful, mj^sterious, and desolating. Ee- 
moved, as we are by many generations, from 
the scenes of its action, we still see the flash 
of its lightnings, and still hear the roar of its 
thunders, as the bolts fall swiftly and terribly 
about the heads of emperors and kings. The 
air is sultry with a feeling of oppression ; and the 
soul, in its recoil from the gloom and sorrow 
that darkens and sobs around it, loses all sense 
of the true proportions of things, and fancies that 
everything was evil then, and nothing good. 

But, take up any party or principle, in an 
unfriendly spirit, to trace its affinities among 
the parties and principles of former times, and 
you may place it in similarly disreputable com- 
pany. Thus, you may illustrate monarchy by 
the excesses of the Oriental kings, or the Ro- 



216 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

man Caesars ; you may make aristocracy re- 
sponsible for the nobles of the middle ages ; and 
democracy for the peasant-wars and French 
revolutions of a later day. A person opposed 
to the Church of England, might say that it is 
still an unrepealed canon with her that papists 
and dissenters may be choked to death for their 
errors.* Another, opposed to Calvinism, would 
show Calvin, Beza, and Melancthon urging the 
incremation of Servetus. A third would tell us 
of the Huguenots roasting papal priests, while 
they were themselves singed with the fires of 
St. Bartholomew ; or of the Scotch parliament, 
with eight thousand Scotchmen dead at the 
hands of the Stuarts, decreeing death against 
the profession of Episcopacy ; or, of the good 
Puritans, flying to the wilderness to escape and 
to establish spiritual despotism. In short, no 
sect or party can look with entire complacency 
upon the deeds of its ancestors, and no sect or 
party has a right to interpret the great lessons 
of history in a narrow, sectarian spirit. 

Now, it seems to us, that the Catholics are 

* See Arnold's Miscellaneous Works, page 188, Ai)ple- 
ton's edition. 



SHOULD WE FEAR THE POPE? 217 

criticised too entirely in this one-sided way. 
Their 02^ponents, drawing a drag-net through 
the impure streams of the middle-ages, bespat- 
ter them with all the rubbish that the cast 
brings up. It is forgotten that those ages were 
ages, in many respects, of the grossest barbarism 
and blindness ; that anarchy and outrage reigned 
everywhere ; that opinion was unformed, and 
authorities at war ; and that if the conduct of 
the hierarchy, stretching across such long pe- 
riods of general violence, exhibits much that is 
rapacious, cruel, and malignant, it was often 
redeeemed by the valuable services which the 
same hierarchy rendered to the cause of learn- 
ing, art, social discipline, popular progress, and 
European unity. 

The representations, therefore, which dwell 
upon the evils of those times exclusively, are 
violent daubs or grotesque caricatures, and not 
historical pictures. They remind us of certain 
galleries in Italy, where the walls teem with 
fagots, stakes, gridirons, broiling martyrs, and 
a horrible array of distorted human anatomy, 
unrelieved by one sweet face, or a single smil- 
ing landscape. 
10 



218 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

We have do disposition to palliate the horrid 
deeds of ancient churchmen, nor to disguise the 
lessons of history ; but we think that, at this 
late day, ecclesiastical battles might be fought 
with other weapons than those the illustrious 
Molly Seagrim used, when she drove her neigh- 
bors out of the sacred enclosure with thigh- 
bones, skulls, and bits of old tomb-stone. 
History is only instructive when it is read in 
the light of philosophy. Its events cannot be 
properly used as isolated facts, nor the charac- 
ters it presents us judged of by the standards 
of modern opinion. Every age and nation must 
be viewed in its peculiar relations. Every age 
and nation has its own methods and its own 
ideas. The boy is not the man ; the man of 
the ninth century is not the man of the nine- 
teenth ; and the etiquette of the court of Queen 
Victoria cannot be applied to the court of 
Queen Pomare. That which might have been 
good government, in one time and place, would 
be very bad government in another time and 
place ; and a course of conduct which seems 
simply impudent and senile in Gregory XVI., 
may have beeen exalted and beneticial in 
Gregory VII. 



SHOULD WE FEAR THE POPE? 219 

These remarks, commonplace as they are, 
have an important bearing upon the particular 
question before us — the temporal power of the 
Popes — which is commonly treated as if the 
tenih and eleventh centuries could be revived, 
and old Hildebrand — true son of fire, as he was 
named — start again from the grave where he 
has rested nearly a thousand years. They for- 
get that that power is no longer a present ter- 
ror, but a simple historical phenomenon. It 
had its origin in the inevitable circumstances 
and necessities of society, at a particular stage 
of its progress, and, having served its ends, 
sometimes salutary, and sometimes quite other- 
wise, it has been dismissed by a kind Provi- 
dence to the limbo of things not wanted on 
earth. 

In illustration, let us refer to a few promi- 
nent historical facts, as to the origin and cul- 
mination of the papal power : 

1. The foundation of every temporal or spir- 
itual enormity, into which the Church was 
destined to run, was laid in the opinion, which 
early obtained, that Christ had founded an ex- 
ternal institution, to be the medium of the new 



220 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

and divine life. It was not only an unavoida- 
ble inference from this, in logic, that such a 
body should be supreme in its moral authority, 
but it was also an unavoidable practical deduc- 
tion that the administrators of its ordinances 
should become among the most wealthy and 
powerful personages in secular society. 

2. The conversion of Constantiue added pro- 
digiously to the temporalities of the Church, 
but, most of all, by conferring judicial and civil 
jurisdiction upon the bishops. His successors 
pursued the same policy, with some exceptions, 
and anybody who will read the Theodosian and 
Justinian codes, will see that the clergy, long 
before the fifth century, were in the possession 
of large patrimonies, were joined in the civil 
and financial administration of the provinces, 
were judges in the courts allowed to decree 
temporal penalties, and often took part in the 
imperial councils. 

3. In the distribution of ecclesiastical rank, 
following generally the political divisions of 
the Empire, the preeminence fell, of course, to 
the See of the imperial city — the foremost city 
of the world. Its local position, fortified by 



SHOULD VTE FEAR THE TOPE? 221 

old renown, and the traditions of St. Peter's 
special favor, made it a centre of attraction and 
reverence to the faithful everywhere, but par- 
ticularly to the churches among the barbarians, 
which its zeal had planted, and which were 
ever eager to testify their respect and submis- 
sion to the venerable mother. 

4. When the Empire w^as transferred to the 
East— an event that ought to have diminished 
the importance of the Roman Church — it hap- 
pened that the distractions of the times turned 
that event into an occasion of its increasing 
power. The emperors, absorbed in their east- 
ern troubles, left the Church almost the only 
authority in the western provinces. Their rep- 
resentatives, the miserable exarchs, for the most 
part plunderers and despots, could not rival the 
priests in the affections of the people. As the 
imperial authority grew weaker, therefore, the 
authority of the Roman Bishop grew stronger. 
The senate, as well as the populace, came to 
regard him as their true head ; so that the Em- 
peror, no longer able to control his affairs, and 
glad of the assistance of so eminent and influ- 
ential a lieutenant, readily confirmed the pow- 



222 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

ers which necessity, no less than general con- 
sent, had conferred. 

5. When, finally, the Popes threw off the 
reins of the Emperors, and imdted the King 
of the Franks to protect them from the savage 
incursions of the Lombards, it was clear that 
the Emperors were too weak to defend and 
retain the Italian provinces, and the exigency 
absolutely required an extraordinary intei-ven- 
tion. The policy of Stephen II. and Adrian I., 
then, which gave great extension to the tem- 
poral sovereignty of the Popes, was quite in- 
evitable under the circumstances. They stepped 
in to save society at a time when there was 
nobody else in a position, or having the will, to 
do so ; and Pepin and Charlemagne, as the 
actual conquerors of the Lombards, when they 
confirmed, by solemn grants, the possessions of 
St. Peter, gave the only constitutional sanction, 
known to the laws of the epoch, to what was 
held by the more legitimate title of ability, 
virtue, service, and the tacit consent of the 
people. 

6. In the midst of the turbulent and almost 
anarchical feudal society, the Pope appeared, 



SHOULD WE FEAR THE POPE? 223 

not only as a prince among princes, but as a 
prince superior to all princes, by virtue of his 
peculiar ecclesiastical eminence. He was natu- 
rally resorted to as an umpire in the settlement 
of disputes, and large fiefs were added to his 
jurisdiction, either to propitiate his favor or as 
a reward for distinguished services. As the 
laws of the Koman empire, moreover, had been 
principally retained in the monarchies which 
succeeded it, all the immunities and privileges 
of the clergy were preserved, and even extend- 
ed, and their intimate association with the 
temporal power enlarged. 

7. The Holy See, at once the centre of re- 
ligion and learning, was also the only authority 
of any kind universally acknowledged. The 
princes, at war perpetually amongst them- 
selves, each In turn invoked its aid against'the 
encroachments of his neighbors. They were 
all equally solicitous to secure its favor, even 
to the extent of consenting to do homage for 
their kingdoms, as if they were held from the 
Pope. Nor were the Popes, whose conduct 
exhibited a singular mixture of zealous piety 
and worldly ambition, backward in accepting a 



224 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

vassalage tendered alike from motives of inter- 
est and devotion. In proof of the state of feel- 
ing, we may mention that, when the crusades 
came on, sovereigns and soldiers alike, regard- 
ing the Popes as the natural leadei-s of the 
great religious wars, often placed their persons 
and properties under their protection. Politi- 
cal affairs were arranged in the Pope's presence, 
treaties concluded, routes of march selected, 
and questions of precedence decided. 

8. The right to depose princes, however, 
grew more directly out of the power of excom- 
munication, which the Church had asserted 
from the earliest times. At first, this ban 
worked only a forfeiture of ecclesiastical rights, 
but after the soverei2:ns took the Church in 
hand, civil disabilities w^ere attached to its 
infliction. The unhappy person who incurred 
it, was not only shut out of the assemblies of 
the faithful, and banished their society, but he 
w\is declared civilly dead, and his dignities, 
rights, and possessions, fell away from him, 
like leaves from a tree smitten by the light- 
ning. All the legislation of the princes con- 
curred in giving validity to ecclesiastical laws, 



SHOULD WE FEAR THE TOPE? 225 

and ill confirming the jurisdiction of bishops 
by civic penalties. When the Popes, there- 
fore, insisting upon the impartiality of God's 
judgments, which could inake no distinction 
between peasant and prince, applied the same 
ban to sovereigns which they applied to serfs, 
they exercised a power to which the sovereigns 
themselves had consented, and whose legiti- 
macy they never questioned as to its general 
grounds, and only as to the justice of its appli- 
cation in the particular case. 

Thus, innumerable circumstances in the po- 
litical relations, the external events, and the 
moral opinions of the time, prepared the way 
for those tremendous assertions of supreme 
temporal sovereignty, which w^ere begun by 
Gregory VII., in his deposition of Henry, and 
continued with vigor, for two or three centu- 
ries, by his successors. They are circumstances 
which do not wholly acquit the Popes of the 
charge of usurpation, but which yet show that 
their conduct was not, as it is often represented 
to have been, utterly indefensible. There was 

a color of law even for their most high-handed 
10* 



226 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

interferences, sanctioned as they were by the 
political constitution of the age, no less than 
by its prevailing religious convictions. 

On the other hand, as this system of conjoint 
spiritual and temporal authority had its rise in 
the circumstances of the time, so it found its 
fall in its own inherent weakness. Viewed 
absolutely, it was a violation of both reason 
and religion, and was only provisionally a good. 
At the height of its prevalence, it was already 
dissolving. Firstly, it could not escape re- 
flecting minds, that every resort to force, direct 
or indirect, by a body professing a spiritual 
origin and genesis, w^as fundamentally incon- 
sistent with its nature and end, and these 
minds were more or less openly at war with 
the policy of the Church. In the second place, 
the enormous wealth which flowed into its 
treasury, in consequence of its vast temporal 
swa}^ corrupted the clergy, and lost them the 
respect of the more severe and pure of their 
own order as w^ell as that of the laics. And 
then, again, the possession of a great and al- 
most uncontrolled power degenerates inevit- 
ably into a two-fold source of abuses ; firstly, 



SHOULD WE FEAR THE POPE ? 227 

in that it becomes a lure to all kinds of selfish 
and reckless ambition, aiid secondly, in that it 
gets impatient of resistance, and persecutes 
\ instead of persuading. 

Accordingly, we see aiany examples of the 
operation of all these principles, before the 
opening of the fourteenth century, and which, 
indeed, kept pace with the growing domination 
of the hierarchy. Internal corruption and ex- 
ternal outrage bred resistance, both within and 
without. When Boniface VIII. entered upon 
his contest with Philip le Bel, of France, he ap- 
peared to himself and to his friends to advance 
with all the strength of the great Gregory, 
while, in reality, the moral and popular sup- 
port, which had been the strength of Gregory, 
had already collapsed. In the south of France, 
the infamous crusade against the Albigenses 
had detached a numerous and powerful body; 
similar disaftections had estranged the whole 
of Flanders ; the thoughts which shortly after 
found vent in the immortal poem of Daiite, the 
great father of Protestantism and the modern 
era, were fermenting in Italy; distant England 
was heaving with the birth of Wickliffe ; and 



228 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

the cultivators of ancient learning, even, had, 
in the silence of the monasteries, begun to 
manifest an abated respect for a clergy whose 
vices were as conspicuous as they were dis- 
graceful. Boniface was, therefore, virtually 
defeated, and, in his defeat, the system itself 
received a fatal blow. Like one who came 
after him, he might have exclaimed that both 
he and his system had ventured too far upon 
the sea of glory, and were left — 

'•' AVeary aud old with service, to the mercy 
Of a rude stream, that must forever hide them." 

That stream vras the awakening life of Chris- 
tendom, inside and outside of the Church, 
which, dissolving the Papacy into the great and 
damaging " western schism," gathered strength 
from the revival of literature, from the growth 
of the universities, from the republican experi- 
ments in Italy, from the Hussite rebellion, 
from the pragmatic sanctions of France, from 
the quickening activity of commerce, from the 
progress of maritime discovery, and the dis- 
closures and inventions of science, until, finally, 
it broke over Europe, in a broad, full tide, as 
the Lutheran Reformation. 



SHOULD WE FEAR THE POPE? 229 

The Temporal Arm made, ever and anon, 
during the interval, spasmodic efforts to re- 
cover its ancient energy; but they were like 
the efforts of a serpent to strike, when its back 
is broken. For five centuries, now, its au- 
thority has steadily declined — nor will it ever 
be revived. We should as soon think of seeing 
Europe invaded again by the Arabs, or thQ 
Christian nations joined once more in a crusade 
to Jerusalem, or the philosophers of the world 
returning to the study of alchemy — as of be- 
holding the rejuvenescence of the middle-age 
constitution of society, and of its foster-brother, 
the old Roman court. Even the religious in- 
fluence of the Church, by which alone its tem- 
poral pretensions can be sustained, will never 
become again what it was before the Reforma- 
tion. 

It is true, as Mr. Macaulay, in his brilliant 
essay on Ranke's History of the Popes, has re- 
marked, that the territorial division of Europe, 
between the Catholics and the Protestants, is 
the same now as it was towards the close of 
the sixteenth century ; that the nations which 
were Catholic then — chiefly the Southern or 



230 - POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

Romanic — are Catholic still ; and those which 
were Protestants then — chiefly the Northern or 
Teutonic nations — are Protestants still ; while 
neither Catholic nor Protestant has mad® any 
substantial gains in the large debatable ground 
in the middle of Europe. But this is true 
only geographically, as Macaulay himself more 
than intimates ; for while the physical frontiers 
of either camp have not advanced, their moral 
and intellectual advances respectively have 
been widely different. The leading Catholic 
nations, at the close of the sixteenth century, 
were Spain and Italy, and these have fallen 
into decay, whereas the leading Protestant na- 
tions, such as England and North Germany, 
have shot up prodigiously in every element 
of vigor. The nations which, before Luther, 
commanded the civilization of the world, were 
nations under the control of Pome ; but the 
nations which now occupy that exalted posi- 
tion, pursue their ends without a thought of 
the Church. England, North Germany, and 
the United States, are openly Protestant ; Rus- 
sia, as the inheritor of Greek catholicity, is 
anti-Roman ; wliile France, though nominally 



SHOULD WE FEAR THE POPE? 231 

Catholic, is rather scientific than religious in 
her development, and is precisely the nation, 
under her renowned Gallic liberties, which 
most strenuously resists the papal predomin- 
ance. Now, it is this superiority of the Pro- 
testant nations, in intelligence, activity, wealth, 
and freedom, w^hich secures them forever from 
conquest, and which will, sooner or later, com- 
pel the Catholic nations to follow in their 
track. It is Protestantism which controls 
civilization and the future destiny of the 
w^orld. 

" But," exclaim a thousand dissentient voices, 
in the face of this reasoning and all these facts, 
"Romanism, by its own showing, remains for- 
ever unchangeable and unchanged. Its pre- 
lates and its official organs adhere as tenacious- 
ly to the temporal supremacy of the Pope 
now^ as they did in the days of the Hohen- 
staufFen and John Lackland ; and, whenever, 
and wherever they can, wall hasten to enforce 
its claims." 

We deny the truth of this position, and we 
scout the inferences which are attached to it, 
to frighten us out of our seven senses. 



232 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

And, in the first place, we remark that this 
doctnne is not an established doctrine of the 
Catholic Church. It is simply a scntentia in 
ecclesia — an unadjudicated question, without 
positive authority, and incumbent upon no 
one's faith. A Catholic may believe what he 
pleases on that subject, and jQt be a good 
Catholic ; he may utterly deny all manner of 
temporal allegiance to the Pope, and yet be a 
good Catholic ; in short, the only allegiance 
expected of him, by the laws of the Church, 
is a belief of its dogmas, and a submission to 
its moral discipline. 

In regard to the ground and extent of the 
temporal power of the Pope, two parties 
exist, and have long existed, in the Church. 
The first, the Ultramontane or theological 
party, contend that the Pope and Church have 
received, immediately from God, full power to 
govern the w^orld, both in spirituals and tem- 
porals.* In its naked form, however, this 
theory, started by John of Salisbury, in the 
twelfth century, found but few advocates. 

* Gosselin, on the Power of the Popes, vol. i., p. 360. 



SHOULD "VVE FEAR THE TOPE? 233 

About the close of the sixteenth, therefore, 
Bellarmin, and other systematic writers, were 
obliged to modify it into this shape : That the 
Church has received from God, directly and 
immediately, no power over temporals, but 
over spirituals solely ; and that this power in- 
cludes, indirectlij, the power of governing tem- 
porals when the good of religion requires it, or 
in certain extraordinary cases, when it is ren- 
dered necessary for the salvation of souls. 
This is the sense in which the doctrine is held 
by most of the Ul tramontanes, though some 
of them modify it still more, so as to restrict 
the right of the Church to a single right to de- 
clare the cases in which a sovereign has forfeit- 
ed his authority, and subjects are absolved from 
their allei^iance — as cases of conscience. But 
the Pope can use no direct means for enforcing 
this declaration, which can only be put in exe- 
cution by the temporal order. Mr. Brownson, 
who is more obstreperous than anybody else 
in vindicating extreme opinions, denies that^ 
the Pope can interfere generally in the civil 
affairs of states, or resort directly to the strong 
arm. For that he must appeal to the civil 



234 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

authority. "The Pope," he says, "does not 
make the law under which the prince holds, 
and can declare him deposed only when he has 
forfeited his rights by the law under which he 
still holds. The act of deposition is judicial, 
not legislative." 

It is this indirect Ultramontanism which is 
in the ascendant among the higher clergy and 
official organs of the Church. The Popes in- 
cline to it, because it extends their preroga- 
tives ; the college of cardinals favors it, be- 
cause every cardinal expects some time or other 
to be Pope ; the Jesuits, we believe, swear to 
it, and a majority of other religious orders re- 
ceive it, together with many of the Spanish 
and Italian bishops, some of the German and 
French, and the leading journals — such as the 
Civiltd CaUoUcd, at Rome, the ITistorische Poli- 
tische Blatter, of Germany, the Univers in Paris, 
the Dublin Tablet, and Brownson's Quarterhj. 

The second party, on the other hand, the 
Gallic or legist party, hold that the spiritual 
and temporal powers are equally sovereign in 
their respective spheres, and independent of 
each other ; and that the Popes and Councils 



SHOULD WE FEAR THE POPE? 235 

which have interfered in the temporal affairs 
of states have done so, either under the hu- 
man and constitutional laws of former epochs, 
or from an erroneous view of their duty. The 
Catholic clergy of France, in 16S2, in the 
famous Declarations, which are the basis of the 
Cisalpine doctrine, said : " Kings and sovereigns 
are not subjected to any ecclesiastical power, 
by the order of God, in temporal things ; and 
their subjects cannot be released from their 
obedience, nor absolved from their oath of alle- 
giance." These declarations were eloquently 
defended by Bossuet. The six Catholic Uni- 
versities, consulted by Pitt, in 17S9 — three 
Spanish, and three French — took this view, 
and earnestly declared that " neither the Car- 
dinals, the Pope, nor even the Church herself, 
has any jurisdiction or power, by divine right, 
over the temporals of kings, sovereigns, or 
subjects," etc. The Irish committee, of 1792, 
made a similar deposition, in behalf of all the 
Catholics of Ireland, which was repeated be- 
fore the House of Commons by all the Irish 
bishops in 1S26. All the old Catholic flmiilies 
of England take this view, with a large num- 



236 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

ber of the German and French bishops, and 
nearly all of those in the United States. As 
to the laity of the Church, they do not bother 
their brains much about the dispute ; the more 
ignorant of them clinging to the Church be- 
cause it has been their fathers' chAirch, and the 
nursing-mother of their superstitions ; and the 
more enlightened, because they find, in its doc- 
trines and cei'emonies, a genuine solace for their 
reliojious feeliuGrs. 

We may regard the controversy, on the 
whole, then, as a kind of drawn battle — some- 
times one party is in the ascendant and some- 
times the other — the Ultramontanes seeming 
to carry the victory always in numbers, and 
the Galileans always in argument ; but, whe- 
ther the one or the other prevail, it need be 
no cause to us either of extravagant alarm or 
extravagant joy. 

For, in the second place, we remark, that, 
whatever may be the state of opinion among 
Catholics, the claim of the Popes to temporal 
power is not at all formidable, in the present 
condition of the world. Churchmen may con- 
ceit what they please about the unchangeable 



SHOULD WE FEAK THE POPE? 237 

nature of the Church, but the testimony of 
reason ^nd history is that it does change, with 
its changes of place, and the advancing aspects 
of society. It is no more now, what it was 
when the monk of Clugni caused the poor 
German Emperor to wait his insolent leisure 
three days in the cold, than the Knights Tem- 
plar are now what they were then. It is one 
thing at Berlin and London, and another at 
Yalladolid or Bologna. The catechism which 
it circulates in France is not the catechism 
which it circulates in Portugal. Nor is this 
owing to policy alone. The force of circum- 
stances, and the existing tone of manners and 
opinions, circumscribe and transform it, just 
as every other institution is modified by the 
medium in which it subsists. What the Papa- 
cy luould be, then, if it coiiU^ is a question of 
no practical moment. What would any sect 
or party be, if unrestrained by adverse parties 
or sects ? Sydney Smith well says : " One 
does not know the order or description of men 
in whom he would like to confide, if they 
could do as they would; our security consisting 
in the fact that the rest of the world won't let 



238 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

'em." Now, the rest of tlie world will not 
allow the Pope, nor anybody else, to do as he 
pleases, let him want to ever so badly ; and, 
until the Pope, particularly, has reconverted the 
world to Catholicism, which will be a consid- 
erable undertaking, he may have as much will to 
thunder as he likes, but he will thunder in vain. 
Consider the history of the papal attempts to 
exert even a limited temporal authority, during 
the last three centuries. The Pope rattled 
away, like a good fellow, against Louis XIV. ; 
but Louis was hardly civil to him, kissing his 
feet, as Voltaire says, but tying up his hands. 
He was dreadfully angry, again, with Philip V 
of Spain ; but he could not hinder Philip from 
going his own gait, nor prevent the Cortes, 
subsequently, from destroying the monastic 
institutions, and confiscating the Church pro- 
perty. He tried his power on Portugal, and 
was repulsed from Portugal, just as if it had 
been Protestant; on Venice, and the Senate 
disdained his legate ; on Austria, whither he 
went personally, but was complacently bowed 
home again ; and on Napoleon, who laughed at 
him, and used him afterwards. 



SHOULD WE FEAK THE POPE? 239 

At the very moment, indeed, in which we 
pen this paragraph, the morning paper, fresh 
with foreign news, informs us that Spain — Ca- 
tholic Spain, as she- is called, by way of emi- 
nence — as she has been called these thousand 
years ; where the Eoman Church is the only 
church that has ever been recognized by the 
state, where a numerous and influential clergy 
are paid from the treasury of the State, where 
they enjoy the highest rank and consideration, 
where the entire people, in fact, are proud to 
hail their monarchs as Most Catholic Majesties 
— Spain, we say, has just passed a law, releasing 
property in mortmain, or, in other words, turn- 
ing into money the consecrated lands and 
dwellings of the clergy and the religious orders, 
in the very teeth, too, of the Pope, and all his 
wire- workers and adherents. 

Indeed, since the Eestoration, when the allies 
complimented him with devout pretenses and 
apparent obsequiousness, but betrayed him to 
the State at the same time, not a government 
on earth, Catholic or Protestant, has treated 
his temporal holiness with a whit more decorum 
than is due to an illustrious prince — one among 



240 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

the powers of Europe. Tliey respect his im- 
portant ecclesiastical position, and the venerable 
associations by which his See is surrounded, 
and, as far as their subjects are Catholic, are 
more or less tender of giving offense ; but they 
do not succumb one tittle to any right or cUiini 
of his to meddle with their civil interests. On 
the contrary, they resent it with a kind of por- 
cupine irritability. One of the most recent 
Ultramontane writers, lamenting the desuetude 
into which the temporal arm has fallen, says, 
that the worst enemies wiiich the Church has 
had to contend with, the last two hundred 
years, have not been either Protestants or 
Turks, but the professedly Catholic govern- 
ments of Europe. *' These nominal Catholic 
sovereigns^" he says lugubriously, " professing 
themselves to be sons of the Church, contribut- 
ing, it may be, to the maintenance of the clergy, 
and to the pomp and splendor of worship ; per- 
haps, like Louis XIV., going so far as to tolerate 
no worship but the Catholic, and using their 
military force to suppress hostile sects, yet 
constantly encroaching on the ecclesiastical 
authority ; demanding concession after conces- 



SHOULD WE FEAR THE TOPE? 241 

sion, and threatening universal spoliation and 
scliisin, if the Church does not accede to their 
peremptory demands, backed by the whole 
physical force of the kingdom, are really more 
injurious to the cause of religion, more hostile 
to the influences of the Church, than open and 
avowed persecutors, even the most cruel. We 
cannot name a single professedly Catholic State 
that has afforded, for these three hundred years, 
more than a momentary consolation to the Holy 
Father, whose bitterest enemies have been of 
his own household ; while the only sovereigns 
in the eighteenth, and the first half of the nine- 
teenth centuries, that treated him with respect, 
w^ere sovereigns separated from his communion." 
This is true : yet not the whole truth ; for it 
conceals the worst feature of the papal degra- 
dation — that it is the willing tool and vassal of 
the kings. If it had been subjected simply by 
the superior force of its pseudo friends, there 
would have been reason for it to complain ; but 
it cheerfully accepts the slavery. It is, at this 
moment, linked in with every despotism of the 
continent, lending itself to their most nefarious 

schemes ; blessing the triumphs of their arms 
11 



242 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

over popular hopes, and proffering a servile 
submission to them in order to divide the ill- 
gotten gains wrung from the weakness, the 
ignorance, and the miseries of the people. Yes ; 
the power, which of old sat in judgment upon 
the rulers of the earth, and, in its fierce contests 
with them, became a symbol of the aspirations 
and faith of the multitude, is now, divested of 
its ideal and representative character, and fallen 
from its own high schemes of superiority and 
jurisdiction, the passive partner of the secular 
princes ; protesting, when it does protest, not 
against the political absolutism of the oppres- 
sor, but against the cries and struggles of the 
oppressed. It prefers the friendship of the 
Czar, even, with his foreign religion, to the po- 
litical emancipation and religious regeneration 
of the nations ; and is greatly more to be feared 
for the doctrines of abject submission to kings 
which it teaches, than for its imputed self- 
assertion. 

But, if this be the condition of things in 
nations avowedly Catholic, how preposterous 
the alarm which is sounded as to the temporal 
aggressions of Popery in countries which are 



SHOULD WE FEAR THE POPE? 243 

wholly emancipated. Let us suppose, for in- 
stance — what is absurd in itself — that Pio None 
should take it into his head to hurl a bull at 
Queen Victoria, or General Pierce, for some 
gross heretical malfeasance, or for an insult to 
Cardinal AViseman, or the legate Bedini, what 
w^ould be the effect? A few of the more de- 
vout Catholics would be thrown into a flutter, 
others would mildly hint that the good Father 
had mistaken his business, while the world in 
general would explode in fits of derision. His- 
torians might, perhaps, recall the time when 
such missives closed the churches, extinguished 
the sacrifice on the altar, suspended christenings 
and marriages, covered the images of the saints 
in mourning, silenced the bells in the tow^ers, 
left the dead unburied, and dressed whole na- 
tions in sackcloth and ashes ; but they would 
recall it as a striking homily on the mutability 
of human affairs — while the great body of the 
people would go about their pursuits, eating 
and drinking, and marrying and giving in mar- 
riage, as utterly unconscious that anything had 
occurred, as a deaf man is of the snapping of a 
pistol behind his back. 



244 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

Of all the nations of the earth, ours is the 
last in which the temporal pretensions of the 
Pontiff, supposing them to be still cherished, 
will make any headway. The democratic prin- 
ciple, of the right of the people to manage their 
own affairs, is so thoroughly ingrained ia our 
whole political life, that fire wdll not burn, nor 
water drown, it out of us. We should a great 
deal rather attempt to take Sebastopol with 
pop-guns, than to convert this nation to an ac- 
quiescence in the old monarchical and religious 
tyrannies. Individuals of recusant sympathies 
will, of course, now and then take shelter under 
the wings of the Pope ; Catholicism, as a reli- 
gion, will gain converts from time to time; 
but, as a political power, it will find the cur- 
rent ever setting more strongly the other way. 
Rome is far more likely to become American, 
under the influences at work here, than America 
Roman. Not a single trait of American cha- 
racter, as it has been thus far developed, har- 
monizes with the genius of that court — not a 
habit of thought, or mode of action, peculiar to 
our people, is cast in its moulds — and there is 
no point or feature of our civil procedure coin- 



SHOULD WE FEAR THE POPE? 245 

cident with the structure of its government or 
the aims of its polity. We are drifting further 
and further away, with the current of the years, 
not only from Rome, but from every vestige of 
ecclesiasticism. Our religion is less ritual, day 
by day, and more and more civic and personal. 
Our literature, our practical enterprise, our 
actual political tendencies, in short, all the 
agencies of our civil and moral life, turn towards 
a practical humanity, as the flower and fruit of 
Christ's blessed redemption of us, and will not 
return. The immense Irish emigration, which 
was once supposed to threaten, though it never 
actually molested, our safety, has reached its 
height, and now begins to slacken. Already 
the preponderance of numbers among the emi- 
grants has passed over to the Germans, among 
whom Popery sits lightly upon those who re- 
ceive it, and is more than neutralized by 
the desperate rationalistic bias of the rest. 
Strauss and Feuerbach. we suspect, are the 
saints of the Germans, who will give our 
Puritan theologians more trouble than all the 
saints of the Romish calendar ; and the creed 
of no-creedism will seduce a larger number 



246 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

of professors than the creed of spiritual sub- 
mission. 

We shall not dwell upon the inexpressible 
meanness of excluding all foreigners from poli- 
tical life, because a number of them happen to 
be Catholics — Catholics from religious associa- 
tion and conviction, and not in the interests of 
a political propagandism — but we shall urge 
one simple thought : that, supposing foreigners 
to be all Romanists, the way to rescue them 
from their error is, not to inclose them, by an 
outward pressure or proscription, into a narrow 
circle of their own, but to tempt them out of 
the fatal ring, into a freer air. If their com- 
munion be haunted by foul superstitions and 
fanaticisms, as sometimes an old decaying struc- 
ture is haunted by bats and owls, you will not 
purify it by closing the shutters and keeping 
them in darkness. It is in darkness, precisely, 
that owls. and bats live. But let in the light of 
heaven upon them, let the brisk wHnd drink up 
the clammy damps, let the fresh, warm sun 
quicken the benumbed and torpid limbs, and 
the bats and owls will fly away ; for the place 
will be no longer congenial to their habits. 



SHOULD WE FEAR THE POPE? 247 

It is a great fact of experience, that, where 
Protestants and Catholics are brought openly 
together, Catholicism is softened and liberalized 
— as in all the frontier districts of Europe — while 
it retains wliatever of evil it may possess, in the 
most unmitigated forms, in the most secluded 
districts. Nay, both parties are improved by the 
association. IIow^ much, in England, France, 
and Germany, have the old hostilities been 
tempered by the common medium in which 
they are diffused ! w^hile in Sweden, Protestant- 
ism, and in Portugal, Spain, and parts of Italy, 
Catholicism, still exhibit the same hard features 
which they wore a hundred years ago. Just in 
proportion as Catholics are permitted to share 
in the civil life of Protestant nations, they have 
thrown off the old prejudices of creed, and begun 
to identify themselves with the general feelings 
and tendencies of the rest of the people. 

In our own country, particularly, the benefi- 
cent and beautiful operation of democracy is 
seen, in the silent and gentle influences by 
w^hich it removes the old enmities of sect and 
race. The slough of a thousand errors, which 
once hissed like so many serpents in the bosom 



248 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

of society, lias been cast, we scarcely know 
how ; deep hatreds, which still burn in Europe 
with intensest zeal, dividing classes irreparably, 
are extinguished here as if by the falling dews ; 
and a genial glow of common sentiments and 
feelings, warms into a higher, nobler humanity 
the hearts of men, no longer curdled into petty 
spites or rancorous animosities by hostile divi- 
sions of privilege and interest. Let us beware, 
then, that we do not arrest or thwart this 
glorious development! Let us be worthy of 
the lofty destiny to which w^e have been called ! 
If we think the dogmas of the Roman Church 
grievous errors ; if we think its policy unfriendly 
to intellectual freedom and to republican go- 
vernment ; if we should be sorr}- to see it more 
generally accepted ; let us be sure that its cor- 
ruptions, whatever they may be, are to be met 
by argument and the force of opinion only, and 
not by legislation. Our fathers, with a wisdom 
as divine as was ever vouchsafed to any conclave 
or synod, decreed an eternal separation of 
Church and State. They forbado the use of 
religious tests, in the decision of civil rights, 
and that prohibition is sound in spirit as well 



SHOULD WE FEAR THE TOPE? 249 

as letter. We hope that the American people 
will never depart from it ; we hope that they 
will continue to exhibit to the w^orld an exalted 
example of true charity; and we are assured 
that, so long as they refuse to allow transient 
prejudices and local irritations to provoke them 
from its kindly dictates, the heavenly Father, 
whose essence is goodness, will richly endow 
them with every needed blessing. 
June, 1855. 
11* 



THE GREAT QUESTION. 

In the year 1S50, it was decreed by con- 
ventions of the Whig and Democratic parties, 
representing three-fifths, at least, of the people 
who concern themselves with politics, that the 
compromise measures were a final settlement, 
" in principle and in substance," of the ques- 
tion of slavery. Mr. Webster, who had con- 
tributed so much talent and reputation to their 
success, as he drew near his death, congratu- 
lated himself, and the country, that there was 
then no part of the territory of the United 
States in which this subject had not been dis- 
posed of by positive law. The President of 
the nation, even, in his first message, was im- 
pelled to speak of those measures as having 
*' given renewed vigor to our institutions, and 
restored a sense of repose and security to the 
public mind throughout the confederacy ;" and 
he promised that this " repose should suffer no 



THE GREAT QUESTION. 251 

shock if lie iiad power to avert it, during his ad- 
ministration." 

Yet, those measures had scacceiy been pro- 
mulged, their great advocate of Massachu- 
setts was hardly cold in his grave, the Presi- 
dent himself was but warm in his chair, when 
the agitation of the slavery question broke forth 
anew, with a universality and earnestness of 
feeling never before equaled. Slavery became at 
once the real and vital question of the day. It 
vibrated in every heart, and burned on every 
tongue. Older issues were dropped in the in- 
tense excitement it occasioned ; the ancient 
rallying cries, once so potent in marshaling the 
electoral lieges around the standards of their 
leaders, grew as charmless as the blasts of fish- 
horns, and the freshest of political frenzies, 
the Know-nothing excitement, which, a year 
before, swept over the land like a torrent, w^as 
arrested and broken into foam by the opposing 
waves of this greater agitation. Tiie hopes of 
a long era of political quiet, engendered bv the 
reconciling action of Congress and the conven- 
tions, were dashed to the ground, and the flames 
of former feud, extinguished for a brief time, 



252 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

were kindled once more into a livelier energy 
and glow. 

But there is a peculiarity in the revived com- 
motion, which it is impossible not to remark. 
During the earlier per.iods of anti-slavery ex- 
citement, it was mainly confined to men of ar- 
dent temperaments and extreme opinion, to 
abolitionists, strictly so-called ; but, as things 
are now, it is shared by men of tempered and 
conservative disposition. The cautious and the 
wise — heads silvered over with age, and hearts 
which experience has taught to beat in meas- 
ured pulses — are joined with more enthusiastic 
spirits in a common cause. It is, indeed, no 
exaggeration to describe the feeling at the North 
as general. If we except the small joint-stock 
association which draws the udders of the fede- 
ral government, and a score or two of eftete 
politicians, who, like the elder Bourbons, forget 
nothing and learn nothing, there is not a think- 
ing man among us who is not absorbed in this 
topic of the domination and spread of slavery. 

Whence this change ? Why are the halcyon 
expectations, which gathered about the com- 
promises as a halo, dispersed ? Why are minds, 



THE GREAT QUESTION. 253 

the least quick to catch the impulses of the 
times, carried away by a prevailing sentiment ? 
Why are they compelled into coalition with those 
for whom, a little while ago, they felt no sym- 
pathy, and whose plans of policy they disap- 
proved ? Is it that the hereditary anti-slavery 
sentiment of the North has received some new 
and mysterious access of violence, like a fever 
which recurs in a more malignant type ? Is 
it that the people of the North have been sud- 
denly seized with some irrational annimosity 
towards their brethren of the South, and rush 
forward, blindly, to the perpetration of an un- 
provoked injustice? Not at all. There is 
nothing? thousfhtless or unkind in the recent 
movement. It is a legitimate fruit of circum- 
stances — a natural and normal development of 
events, which any sagacious student of cause 
and effect might have predicted, and which, 
indeed, was predicted by many in the deepest 
lull of 1850. 

In the first place, there can be no finality in 
politics, except in the establishment of justice 
and truth. Where society is divided on a prin- 
ciple, and that principle involves, besides its 



254 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

moral issues, vast practical interests, no parlia- 
mentary device or legislative expedient can put 
a stop to the discussion of it — no compromis- 
ing adjustment of it can settle it forever. The 
very attempt to settle it, in this way, though 
it may succeed in quelling an existing vehe- 
mence of agitation, will, in the end, provoke a 
more vehement reaction. For the mind of man 
is, in its nature, vital and irrepressible ; you may 
force it down but you cannot keep it there ; its 
inherent elasticity wnll cause it to spring back, 
and in that spring, perhaps, it will tear into 
shreds the cords by w^hich it w^as bound. 
When the compromisers of 18-50, therefore, un- 
dertook to suppress the discussion of slavery, 
they undertook what was plainly impossible ; 
and much of the exacerbation which has since 
arisen must be referred to a natural revolt 
against that impracticable enterprise. 

But, in the second place, there is to be re- 
marked a special cause for the late outbreak of 
anti-slavery feeling, and particularly for its ap- 
pearance among those classes wiiich have not 
heretofore manifested a strong tendency in that 
direction. It is this : that a gigantic fraud 



THE GREAT QUESTION. 255 

has beun committed in the name of slavery, 
which has aroused a keen sense of wrong, and 
filled the dullest understandings with appre- 
hensions for the security of our future liberties. 
The Kansas-Nebraska bill — which repealed the 
Missouri Compromise, sprung like a trap, as it 
was, upon a Congress not chosen in reference 
to it ; hurried through the forms of legislation, 
under whip and spur, by a temporary majority ; 
alleging a falsehood in its very terms, and hav- 
ing the seizure of a vast province, secured to 
freedom by thirty years of plighted faith, as its 
motive — was the fatal signal which, after as- 
tounding the nation by its audacity, rallied it 
to battle. 

A few months before this repeal was perpe- 
trated, the very abettors of the transaction had 
pronounced it impossible. The committee of 
the Senate which reported it, had pronounced 
it impossible. Not a man in the Union but 
would, at that time, have pronounced it equal- 
ly impossible, had his opinion been asked ; yet 
it was repealed by the simple declaration, which 
all the world knew to be untrue, that it had 
been rendered inoperative by the legislation of 



256 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

1850 ! Marvelous assurance, but still more 
marvelous success ! 

We shall not inquire here whether the Mis- 
souri Compromise was originally proper or not ; 
averse as we are to compromises in general, we 
are not sure that it would not have been better 
for all sides to have settled the dispute at that 
time on a basis of principle, and at all hazards ; 
but, inasmuch as the South had reaped its share 
of the benefit proposed by the bargain — inas- 
much as its continuance involved, to a consid- 
erable extent, the good faith of the South, we 
are clear that the disturbance of it by the South 
was neither honorable nor wise. In accepting 
the responsibility of the deed, it has both lost 
an opportunity and committed a fault. Had it 
spurned the ofter of the territories, when it w^as 
made, it would have achieved a moral triumph 
far more valuable to it than any other immedi- 
ate success can be. But the virtue of its rep- 
resentatives was not equal to the occasion — the 
spirit of Henry, Wythe, Macon, Jefferson, was 
not theirs. Or had it, after the act was con- 
summated in Congress, withheld its approval, 
and manifested a willingness to allow the North 



THE GREAT QUESTION. 257 

a fair chnnce in the appropriation of land, so 
long consecrated to freedom by its own consent, 
there would have been a color of equity in its 
proceedings, which w^ould have gone far in 
tempei ing the horror and reprobation which the 
original offense provoked. But here again the 
Soutli proved unworthy of its opportunities. 
It has sustained and abetted the lawless inva- 
sion of Kansas, by the armed marauders of Mis- 
souri. It has sent thither its agents, or allowed 
them to go — which is the same thing — in order 
to subjugate the peaceful settlers, and to im- • 
pose a peculiar social system upon them against 
their will. The Kansas Legislature, acting in 
the name of the South, is a usurping body. 
The people of Kansas, overruled by violence at 
the elections, are not its constituents. It re- 
flects no popular sovereignty, only the sway of 
the mob ; and they who support its cause sup- 
port the ascendancy of the bowie-knife and the 
rifle over the ballot-box and the law. 

Under this condition of facts and events, it 
was very natural that public opinion at the 
North should be stung into a keen and vivid 
resentment. Averse as it may have been to 



258 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

any interference witli the internal relations of 
the South ; willing, as it has shown itself, to 
accept any settlen:ient of difficulties which did 
not involve an actual approval of tlie Southern 
system ; hoping that, under a geographical de- 
marcation of the respective regions of slavery 
and freedom, the causes of dispute would be 
gi-adually supplanted by the advancing enter- 
prise, if not by the Christianity and democracy, 
of the nation — or be reduced, at least, to the 
smallest possible surface of contact — it has 
« yet been able to discover in that repeal, and in 
the conduct by which it has been followed up, 
nothing less than a rooted determination to ex- 
tend the peculiar social usages of the South 
over the whole West, in the face of contracts 
and laws, and to the exclusion of freedom. 
How then, in the name of humanity, could the 
North listen to the avowal, or witness the in- 
cipient steps in the execution of such a scheme, 
without loudly protesting against it, and re- 
solving to resist it to the end ? 

The repeal of the Compromise was the prac- 
tical triumph of a party w^hich is the w^orst in 
its principles, and the most dangerous in its 



THE GREAT QUESTION. 259 

designs, of any party that ever arose in the Re- 
public. We refer to the propagandists of 
slavery, whose unquestionable purpose it is to 
rule the Union, if they can, and if they, cannot, 
to set up a southern slave confederacy for 
themselves. They are few in numbers as yet, 
though great in influence ; but they have of 
late gi'own rapidly in both, and w^ill be pro- 
digiously strengthened by success in Kansas. 

Let us sketch the rise and progress of cer- 
tain sentiments, briefly, in order to show the 
bearing of their schemes. 

When the Constitution of the United States 
was formed, slavery existed in nearly all the 
States; but it existed as an acknowledged evil, 
whicli, it was hoped, the progress of events 
would, in the course of a few years, extinguish. 
With the exception of South Carolina, there 
was not a State in w^hich some decided efl?brts 
had not been made towards its alleviation and 
ultimate removal. It was this feeling, that it 
was an evil, and that it would soon be abated, 
which excluded all mention of slavery by name 
from the Constitution, and which led to the 
adoption of such a phraseology, in the parts refer- 



260 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

ring to the subject, that they do not necessarily 
imply its existence. The Constitution was 
made for all time, while the makers of it sup- 
posed slavery to be but a transient fact, and 
the terms of it consequently were adapted to 
the larger purpose, and not to the temporary 
exigency. A jurist from the interior of China, 
who knew nothing of the actual condition of 
our country, or Justinian, could he arise from 
the dead, would never learn, from the mere 
readinc: of that instrument, of the existence of 
slavery. He would read of "persons held to 
service," and of certain '-'other persons," who 
were to be counted only as three-fifths in the 
distribution of representative population ; but 
he would never imagine them, unless expressly 
told, a species of property. The general senti- 
ment was averse to slavery, and the men of 
the Revolution were unwilling to recognize it, 
except in an indirect and roundabout way, and 
then only, as they expected, for a limited 
period. 

For many years subsequent to the Revolu- 
tion, a similar feeling prevailed throughout the 
South as well as at the North. The most in- 



THE GREAT QUESTION. 261 

tense expressions of disapproval that have ever 
been uttered against the system, may be quoted 
from the writings of those who were born and 
brought up under it : and whenever it was 
defended, it was defended on the ground, not 
that it was right, or even desirable, but that it 
was inevitable. " It is fastened upon us," said 
the South, " and we must do the best with it 
that we can. We are like men in a morass, 
who cannot spring at once to the firm land, 
but who must work their way thither, gradually, 
as they are able. We trust that Providence 
has some good end in thus afflicting us — what 
it is we do not see — we discover certain inci- 
dental goods in our strange relations ; but we 
must look to God to justify his own dealings 
to us in this wretched business." This was the 
pervading tone ; few regarded slavery as any- 
thin 2: less than a curse, and none held it to be a 
permanent condition. As for the domestic 
trade in slaves, it w^as generally execrated. 
John Randolph, as late as 1S16, denounced it, 
on the flooi* of Congress, as "heinous and 
abominable," "inhuman and illegal," and Gov. 
Williams, of South Carolina, spoke of it in one 



262 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

of his messages as " a remorseless and merciless 
traffic," the result of " insatiable avarice," con- 
demned " by enlightened humanity, wise policy, 
and the prayers of the just." 

But the rapid extension given to the cotton 
trade, by the contrivance of the gin, and by the 
manufacturing industry of Great Britain, pro- 
duced a vast change in the opinions of the 
country. As the slave system spread, and the 
hopes of its ultimate extinction diminished, it 
was found necessary by the slaveholders, in 
order to justify to their own consciences their 
adherence to it, and to shelter their conduct 
from the indignant censure of the w^orld, to in- 
vent some plea which should be plausible at 
least, if not well-founded. In pursuance of this 
need, they resorted to the Bible to show that 
slavery was divinely allowed, and could not 
be, therefore, in itself, wrong. They ransacked 
physiological science, to establish the inferiority 
of the black race, and the consequent duty of 
protecting it, and educating it to labor. They 
began to interpret the designs of Heaven, con- 
tending that slavery was to be made an instru- 
ment in raisins: the enshived Africans to a know- 



THE GREAT QUESTION. 263 

ledge of the industrial arts and Christianity, 
and in the subsequent civilization,^ through 
them, of the vast continent from which they 
were originally taken. 

All this reasoning, however, imj^lied no more 
than a temporary state of slavery, making it 
probationary or propaedeutic, and not justifying 
it as a final or permanent condition. The 
motives assigned in apology for it, looked to 
the future redemption of the slave, to his im- 
provement in the methods of civilized life, and 
of course to his restoration to a condition in 
which those methods would avail himself and 
his race. 

A sterner logic was required to meet the 
difficulties of the j^roblem, which was nothing 
less than the reconciliation of a selfish interest 
to universal conscience — at all times a most 
embarrassing affair. If slavery were right be- 
cause only of its probable and ultimate benefits 
to the slave caste, the inference could not be 
avoided that the time must come when that 
caste, or the superior portions of it, at least, 
might be emancipated. The opponents of the 
slaveholders might justly taunt them, on their 



264 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

own premises, i'ov coutiiiuiiig the system be- 
yond the period requisite fur the fulfiUment of 
its alleged purposes. They might reasonably 
demand that some definite term be put to the 
time of this educationary discipline ; that the 
system, in fact, should be resolved into a spe- 
cies of apprenticeship; and that the lot of its 
enforced beneficiaries should be illuminated by 
some hope or prospect,^ however distant, of 
final release. For of wliat use to tlie slave, or 
to his race, would be an education protracted 
to the hour of his death? Education is a means 
to some end, and where the end is withheld, the 
means is worthless. How were negroes, taught 
the social arts here, to benefit their fellows in 
Africa, if they were to be held here in perpetual 
bondage ? Why teach them knowledge, which, 
in raising them individually above their original 
savageness, could only render them more keenly 
sensible that their out-look embraced no 
future ? 

It was hard for the slaveholders to reply, 
and so the bolder among them shifted their 
grounds. They began to aver that slavery 
was a good in itself — that it was the natu- 



THE GREAT QUESTION. 265 

ral relation of the two races — tliat negroes 
could never be anything more, by the fiat 
of God, than the servants of the vi^hite man ; 
and that a society, constructed upon this ar- 
rangement, in which the inferior should do all 
the work, and the superior exercise the pro- 
tection and guidance (beside enjoying the best 
fruits), was the truest and happiest society that 
could be conceived. It was a heaven-ordained 
socialism — thoroughly articulated and organ- 
ized, effective and economical as an industrial 
machine — benevolent as a provision for the 
poorer classes, so woefully overlooked in other 
societies, ample in its furniture of motives and 
means for the ripest culture in the higher 
classes, and rendering the interchanges of life 
between different ranks, whose interests are 
radically united, a perpetual reciprocation of 
gratitude, affection, and care. 

With this change in opinion, from despairing 
lament or feeble apology to positive vindication, 
came a corresponding change in practice, from 
defense to aggression. While the greater part 
of the slaveliolders accepted the glorifying view 
of their system merely as a politic reaction 



266 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

against the bitter reproaches of the civilized 
world, or as a plesant couleur de rose dream-land, 
into wliich imagination might escape from the 
too painful reality, there were others, more 
daring spirits, with whom argument was ac- 
tion, and of whom it might be said — 

" Straightforward goes 

The lightning's path, and straight the fearful path 
Of the cannon-ball/' 

Without caring a whit for the right or wrong, 
the good or evil of slavery, or of anything else, 
and animated mainly by an insatiable thirst for 
power and gain, they found it exceedingly 
convenient to adopt the philanthropic theory. 
They eagerly embraced the premises, and more 
eagerly shot to the conclusion. Slavery is a 
good thing, a desirable thing, a benefaction and 
heaven's blessing to all concerned, and ergo, 
ought not to be restricted, but diftused ! There 
was the whole question ! Why limit so excel- 
lent a social institution to the few States that 
are now basking in its genial beams? Why 
not spread the benefits of it over the North ? 
Why be so cruel as to withhold it from the 
poor benighted Territories, or from languish- 



THE GREAT QUESTION. 267 

ing Mexico, or from the wilderness shores of 
the Amazon ? Or why shut otF its natural sup- 
plies from the teeming founts of Congo and 
the Gold Coast? 

They were consecutive reasoners, you see, 
these fellows, and practical men, besides; and 
accordingly, they set to work to remodel both 
the principles and practices of the South. Ex- 
ploding the old democratic creed, that man had 
inherent and inviolable rights, which had been 
the inspiring faith of the glorious days of the 
Revolution, and trampling dowm the once cher- 
ished conviction of the sovereign supremacy 
of the States, wathin their own jurisdiction, 
they proclaimed that only a particular race of 
men had rights, that the States were nothing 
more than departments, that slavery was the 
one supreme and universal interest, and that it 
might go everywhere and determine every 
question. Brave propagandists ! It was to 
you we owed the breaking down of all old and 
sacred distinctions, to you we owed our wars 
for the acquisition of new land — to you the 
spirit of encroachment and aggrandizement 
which is abroad — to you the filibustering ex- 



268 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

peditions which disgrace our name — to you the 
fugitive slave law, which would convert free- 
men into bloodhounds — to you the incessant 
agitation of slavery, and an insolence which 
hangs the fate of the Union on a constant sub- 
seiTience to its behests ! and now, as the latest 
step in this career of conquest, as the very 
coup de grace to our national freedom and the 
independence of the States, comes this erasure 
of an ancient landmark, which had stood for 
thirty years, like a long line of coast, against 
which the black billows dashed themselves 
only to be broken ! Grant this triumph and 
where will you stop ? On what remote bound- 
ary of our possible empire, in what era of un- 
knov/n time will your god Terminus erect his 
altar"? Whither shall we fly to escape 3^our 
frowns, where look for a rescue from your ab- 
horrent domination ? 

It must not be forgotten, however, that this 
small but desperate and determined knot of 
propagandists would never have achieved the 
influence they have, if the political parties of 
the country had maintained their primitive rec- 
titude and honor. Had they continued to fight 



- THE GREAT QUESTION. 269 

as Washington and Franklin fought, as Jeffer- 
son and Adams and Madison fought, for princi- 
ples and not small expediencies, there is no 
local faction that could have made head against 
them for any length of time. But with suc- 
cess comes relaxation ; with victory, indulgence ; 
with prosperity and power, corruption. Our 
parties, once having tasted the luscious spoils 
of office, made them the end of their life. They 
lost the stringency and sternness of conviction, 
the nobleness and purity of purpose, in which 
they began. They were debauched ; they fell 
into the hands of men of small ambitions and 
cold hearts ; their creeds became the merest 
hodge-podge of contradictory maxims, and their 
conduct a series of contemptible shifts, and 
doublings, and prostitutions. 

A late foreign writer, observing from an im- 
partial stand-point the aspect of our aftairs, 
says that " Few things have more surprised the 
world than the deterioration of the political 
men of America, When the United States 
were a mere aggregate of scantily-peopled colo- 
nies, when their principal citizens were plant- 
ers, shop-keepers, and traders, trained up in 



270 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

the narrowness, and prejudices, and petty em- 
ployments of provincial life, tliey produced 
statesmen and negotiators, and administrators 
and legislators whose names will be forever 
illustrious in history. Now that they form a 
great empire, that they possess a large class 
of men born in opulence, to whom all the 
schools and universities of each hemisphere are 
open, who have leisure to pursue the studies 
and to acquire the habits of political life, few 
of their public men would pass in Europe for 
tolerable second-rates." What other conclu- 
sion could he draw, when the chair of Wash- 
ington and Jefferson has come to be occupied 
by a Tyler and a Pierce, and the diplomacy of 
a Franklin and an Adams is represented by that 
of a Soule and a Borland? Yet the decay of 
leaders would be nothing, were there no evi- 
dences of a similar degeneracy in the spirit of 
society, which unfortunately happens to be the 
case. Our civil life exhibits an almost univer- 
sal demoralization ; there is scarcely a party 
among us which hokls to any consistent theory 
of government or Uiw, or which can enunciate 
two principles that are not utterly incompati- 



THE GREAT QUESTION. 271 

ble — while political presses, public documents, 
speeches in Congress, and even the discourses 
of the pulpit, are filled with arguments, appeals, 
and denunciations, which show an utter aban- 
donment of the foundation-principle of our 
nation. A gross materialism, the success of 
trade, the progress of gain, an external expe- 
diency, is preferred to lofty ideal aspirations and 
spiritual truth. The grand and beautiful theory 
w^hich lies at the centre of our institutions, their 
noble humanitarianism, their just and magnani- 
mous recognition of the worth of every human 
being, their utter disdain of the spirit of caste, 
of exclusion, of selfish aggrandizement — no 
longer touch our hearts, and kindle them into 
a fine enthusiasm. Great deeds are not done 
among us. The atmosphere around us is cold, 
and ungenial. We speculate how to get rich ; 
we build railroads and ships, to increase our 
stores; we spy out the neighboring lands which 
promise us luxurious harvests hereafter; we re- 
turn the panting fugitive to his life-long doom ; 
but the heroic virtues, the chivalric sentiments, 
the sweet, and tender, and self-forgetful im- 
pulses, which constitute the true and only glo- 



272 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

ries of maiilioocl, we lay aside, forgetting them, 
even in oar prayers. "Oil! reverence," says 
tlie poet, " tlie dreams of tliy youtli !" but tlie 
fair dreams of our youtli we despise. Tlie dream 
that this young land, fresh from the hands of 
its Creator, unpolluted by the stains of time, 
should be the home of freedom and a race of 
men so manly that they would lift the earth by 
the whole breadth of its orbit nearer heaven, 
that it should be a light to the struggling na- 
tions, holding on high, forever, the standard of 
justice and humanity, and supplanting the 
despotism under which mankind had withered, 
by a rich, and noble, and free republican civili- 
zation, has passed away from the most of us as 
nothing but a dream. We yield ourselves, in- 
stead, to calculation, money-making, and moral 
indifference. The prophet of the Lord might 
again cry in our streets, " How is the gold be- 
come dim, how is the most fine gold changed !" 
It is a dark view of things we have taken ; 
not darker tlian circumstances warrant, and 
yet not altogether hopeless. Behind the. foul 
and earth-born-mists overspreading the lower 
skies, glimpses arc to be had of a fairer heaven. 



THE GREAT QUESTION. 273 

Behind the mean and sordid life of politics, 
shutting out the sunshine for a time, there is a 
great, true life, which may yet redeem this 
people. At the South there are many noble, 
Christian souls, who have not been withered 
by the bliglit of slavery, and to whose generous 
impulses the creed of the vulgar propagandists 
is as repugnant as the creed of the pirate. They 
have thought too long and earnestly of the evil 
they suffer, to disguise its character, and they 
are too kind and just in sentiment, to wish to 
impose it on others. In their prayers and 
struggles against it, lies the hope of a better 
issue to the aw^ful question than is contained in 
the violent solution of the more active men by 
whom they are, for the present, silenced and 
overborne. It is to their wisdom and piety 
that we look for a brighter future. Nor at the 
North are w^e wholly given up to the idolatry 
of " Timour-Mammon." Scattered over the 
broad inland are thousands upon thousands of 
cheerful homes, which nurture a race to whom 
the heavenly law, and not the earthly greed, is 
the rule of duty. They retain the simple hon- 
esty, the masculine vigor, the love of liberty 
12* 



274 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

and of God, which came to them from the stern 
old republican stock of England, from those 
who fought with Cromwell, and read John Mil- 
ton. Indeed, in no nation of the world do we 
believe that more intelligent, upright, self-sac- 
rificins: and enersretic men and women are to 
be found than in this — w^here the best culture 
of Europe is so w^idely diffused, where religion 
is so free and so active, and where the sweet 
influences of woman are so heartily accepted. 
But the misery is, that these virtuous and re- 
deeming classes have been elbowed by the poli- 
ticians, and their rude herd, into obscurity. 
Shrinking from the clamor, and meanness, and 
ribaldry of political exertion, they have retired 
witli disgust into their cottages and fields, into 
their stores and workshops, into their parlors 
and libraries, and they have thus left the arena 
free for the gladiators and the wild beasts, who, 
having mauled and torn each other, turn at last 
to rend the innocent citizen, and to desolate the 
peaceful liome. 

We conceive that in pointing out the two 
evils to which we have referred, namely, the 
aggressions of slavery and the corruption of 



THE GKEAT QUESTION. 275 

parties, we liave struck upon the very mother 
sins of our career. Tliey are the sources to 
which may be traced every error and iniquity 
that we have fallen into : not only external of- 
fenses against honor and justice, such as Texan 
forays, and Cuban freebooting, but the deeper 
inward debasement — the decay and meanness 
of spirit, which could submit to fugitive slave 
laws, and other outrages, the most insulting 
ever inflicted upon a free people ; and it will 
be impos.'^ible to retrieve the past until the 
mighty stream of influences which they pour 
forth is stopped. Unless there is integrity, 
self-respect, and decision enough in our society 
to arrest these gangrenes, they will spread un- 
til they have corroded the whole body. Unless 
there is moral vitality in our heart sufficient to 
assert itself against the powerful poisons already 
in the blood, we may be sure that the circu- 
lation will carry them soon to every member, 
till there shall be no health nor life in us. 

But these two evils are in reality one — or~ 
are, at least, reciprocally cause and effect of 
each other, inasmuch as they have both the 
same origin — the departure of the nation, in 



276 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

feeling and practice, from the idea in which it 
was founded. Nations, like man himself, have 
certain ends or ideals of existence, which con- 
stitute the inmost ground or essence of their 
being, and when they depart from these, they 
either degrade themselves into some lower 
form, or grow into monsters. Men who cease 
to be men, become either animals or fiends. 
Nations, which lose their constituent principles, 
Ml into barbarism, or rush into some diabolic 
fury. Their salvation lies alone in their ad- 
herence to the great thought which gave them 
their original organic unity. 

Now, the great thought, the fundamental 
idea, the constituent principle of our nation- 
ality, was the liberty of all men, secured by 
equal laws, and defended from invasion, either 
on the part of the state or of individuals, by the 
whole power of the state. The peculiarity of 
organization by which this liberty was made 
sure, was that distribution of power whereby 
every mature locality was rendered free and 
supreme in whatever concerned itself solely, 
yet cooperative in more general spheres, so that 
there was a perfect equilibrium in the centripe- 



THE GREAT QUESTION. 277 

tal and centrifugal forces of government, as ia 
the solar system. The great object of the ar- 
rangement was the security, the elevation, the 
freedom of the individual, who, regarded as the 
child of God, as the joint heir with others of 
the earth, as an immortal spirit, capable of an 
infinite growth in love, and truth, and beauty, 
was too sacred not to be hedged round by 
every defense, and helped forward by every 
kind nurture and care. He was the Prince of 
the Great King, for whom all the granaries 
were to be filled, and all the treasures dis- 
played, and all the bells to ring out a joyous 
welcome. 

We must return to our fundamental princi- 
ples, to our primitive spirit, to the noble and 
manly moral tone, which made us giants in our 
youth, if we would not dwindle into dwarfs. 
No single measure of improvement, nor series 
of measures, can help us, if we do not recover, 
along with them, the old inward health and 
soundness. A restoration of the Missouri Pro- 
hibition, for instance, at which so many aim, 
though important as a sign of repentance, and as 
a restitution for wrong done, would be, in itself, 



278 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

but a iirst step towards the iiifiiiitely greater end, 
the regeneration of the mind of the people on 
the subject of shivery. There will be no peace, 
nor purity, nor noble vigor, until, as a federa- 
tion, we shall have discharged ourselves of all 
responsibility for a system vitally at war with 
its objects. The separate states have a larger 
and more difficult task, and they must stand or 
fall by their fidelity to its duties ; they must 
struggle with their own burdens ; we cannot 
help or relieve them, except by their own con- 
sent ; but the confederacy has but one single, 
plain, and inevitable course. It must be free ! 
how wildly soever interested factions may rage 
against the attempt to recover the ground that 
has been lost, deep and wide as are the delu- 
sions which are to be scattered, painful as may 
be the process of healing, even to the dividing 
asunder of the joints and marrow, the Repubic 
must be free ! The dearest memories of the 
past, the saddening aspects of the present, the 
hopes of the future, alike proclaim it as the im- 
perative law of duty for us of the present day, 
that the licpublic must be free. As in days of 
yore— 



THE GREAT QUESTION. 279 

" Hills flung that cry to hills around, 

And ocean-mart replied to mart, 
And streams, whose springs were yet uufound, 
Pealed far away the startling sound. 

Into the forest's heart." 

So let it be again flung abroad till every stain 
is wiped from our soil, and the recreancy of our 
hearts retrieved. 

There is a time in the history of nations, as 
there is in the life of the individual, and as 
there was in the life of Christ, when the Devil 
carries them up into a high mountain, and 
offers them all the kingdoms of the earth if 
they will but worship him. At such a time 
have we arrived in our national career. The 
spirit of evil points us to the vast outlying re- 
gions of the globe, and he promises that all 
these shall be ours, with riches, and power, and 
glory, if we will but covet them, and take 
them, and think no more of the other spirit, 
which only whispers in sadness to our inmost 
soul, that goodness is better than wealth, that 
truth is greater tlian power, and that the beau- 
ty of a humane and benignant life is the bright- 
est glory of man. Let us beware how we 
choose ! 



NORTHERN OR S OUTHERN, WHICH? 

The recent exciting and protracted contest, 
as to the organization of Congress, was signifi- 
cant, in more respects than one. It was a topic- 
al symptom of a general state, showing a large 
amount of derangement, and yet a tendency to 
recuperation. 

We saw the representatives of the people 
brought to a complete deadlock by the anta- 
gonism of parties, each pulling a different way, 
with no one strong enough to prevail, and no 
two, seemingly, ready to coalesce. For two 
months, nearly, the usual course of legislation 
was suspended on the settlement of a prelim- 
inary dispute as to the Speakership. 

Yet the House of Representatives was never 
more truly representative than in this tempor- 
ary paralysis of its functions ; for the whole 
nation is in pretty nearly the same predica- 
ment. Its politics are decussated, if we may 



281 

use the expression, not by well-defined pai-- 
ties, but by numerous opposing factions. Their 
conflicts, bat for the seriousness of the subjects 
involved, would exhibit as droll a spectacle as 
Marry att describes in his triangular duel. The 
Republicans, taking a pistol in either hand, 
fire away at the Democrats and the Americans ; 
the Americans, doing the same, fire at the Re- 
publicans and the Democrats ; while the Demo- 
crats, again, discharge their pieces at the 
Americans and the Republicans. Everybody 
shoots at everybody else ; and everybody, let 
him aim in whatever direction he will, is sure 
to aim at an enemy, who is also aiming at him, 
thus rendering the exposure equal, and the 
chances of sudden disaster somewhat even. 

It was evident, however, during the struggle 
in the House, in spite of the seeming and su- 
perficial differences of opinion among the seve- 
ral factions, that there was, radically, but a 
single issue. Each member felt, as he gave 
his vote for this or that candidate, though he 
was not always ready to avow it, that the 
turning-point of all was, the question of 
slav.ery. All the other questions, which may 



282 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

have operated in forming little knots of voters, 
were incidental, or aside, like the small eddies 
which whirl about in the very current of the 
principal vortex. Banks and Aiken were the 
leaders of the hosts between which the real 
battle was fought, while they who shouted for 
Fuller, Zollikoffer, and what not, were only 
deserters from the main ranks, or camp-follow- 
ers and marplots. 

Nor were leaders ever chosen with more in- 
stinctive wisdom, considering the peculiarity 
of their relations to this predominant issue. 
Mr. Banks was a man of the people, who had 
risen by his own efforts from an humble me- 
chanical occupation to a high political office ; 
while Mr. Aiken was a slaveholder, one of the 
wealthiest of his class, endowed with all the 
better qualities of that class, and as sincere as 
he was strong in his geographical convictions. 
Mr. Banks represented the State of Massachu- 
setts — itself the best example of a free condi- 
tion of society to be found on the face of the 
earth ; while Mr. Aiken represented South 
Carolina — long distinguished as the ablest ex- 
ponent of both the opinions and the influences 



NORTHERN OR SOUTHERN, WHICH? 283 

of the slave-civilization. In these champions, 
the two social systems of the North and South 
were pitted against each other, and, for the 
first time so openly and directly, in the history 
of our national existence. 

In the same way, the nation, in the midst of 
the parties and agitations by which it is dis- 
tracted, recognizes the fundamental and vital 
question to be that of slavery. Wink it out 
of sight as we may, or complicate it as we 
may, it cannot be disguised, that slavery is the 
single real element of party divisions. Openly 
or secretly, it controls the action of all par- 
ties. They come together, as in the case of 
the Americans, for other ostensible purposes ; 
but before they separate, are fiercely at logger- 
heads about this matter. Every ancient party 
organization has been sundered by it, and their 
members, in forming new party ties, are almost 
exclusively controlled by it. The first condi- 
tion they exact, before joining anybody is, that 
it should think thus and so of the slavery 
question. 

But what is the slavery question? What is 
the real issue at the bottom of the excitement 



284 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

which gathers about this word slavery, as a 
nucleus '? Let us answer, iu the outset, that 
it is not a question as to the merits of slavery 
in itself, or rather in its adaptation to those 
communities in which it ah'eady exists. AVith 
the exception of a certain class of philanthro- 
pists, who conceive it their duty to wage war 
against every form of injustice everywhere, we 
know of no class in this country who wish to 
interfere with those communities. At least, 
there is no distinct or formidable political 
party professing such an object. A great many 
individuals at the North, not indifferent to the 
cause of humanity, claim the right to consider 
and criticize Southern society, just as they do 
the various societies of Europe and Asia. But 
the great body of the people have never 
evinced any aggressive disposition beyond that, 
and are willing to leave the practical treatment 
of slavery in the states to those who know 
its evils, and are to be presumed best able to 
devise a remedy. AVhat concerns them solely 
and exclusively is, the relation of slavery to 
their own interests and responsibilities. It 
might be conceded that the peculiar socialism 



NORTHERN OR SOUTHERN, WHICH? 285 

of the South is the best for it, uDcler the cir- 
cumstances, that human wisdom can conceive ; 
or, that it has the divine sanction — being 
equally beneficial to the w^hite and black races 
without touching the marrow of our public 
dispute. , 

The relil question turns upon the struggle of 
two incompatible orders of civilization for the 
mastery of a common field. It has fallen to 
the lot of this country to make the attempt to 
confederate a series of states, separated by two 
distinct social systems ; and, though the at- 
tempt is not impracticable in itself, nor w^as it 
impracticable under the original conditions, 
nor is yet impracticable, could these conditions 
be adhered to — the actual working of the ex- 
periment has developed a broad and serious 
antagonism. The evidences of a latent differ- 
ence have casually appeared, from the begin- 
ning ; but they were adjusted as they appear- 
ed, on the principle of peaceful compromise. 
In a late flital and perfidious hour, however, 
that principle was flung to the w^inds, and the 
elements of discord left to the chance of a 
hand-to-hand encounter. 



286 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

The controversy, between what may be 
termed our Northern and Southern civiliza- 
tions, presents two aspects : first, whether the 
influences of the one or the other shall pre- 
dominate in the federal government ; and, sec- 
ondly, w^hether the one or the other of these 
influences shall prevail in the organization of 
new territories. Virtually, these questions 
are one ; for whichever side succeeds in re- 
gard to the first point, will be sure to succeed 
in regard to the second, and vice versa. 

As to the first aspect of it, we are all aware 
what the facts of the case have been hitherto ; 
we are all aw^are, that for many years the in- 
terests of slavery have carried the day, in 
nearly every department of the national gov- 
ernment. The executive has always inclined 
to that side, and so has the judiciary, and, 
with occasional exceptions, both branches of 
the legislature. It came to such a pass, in- 
deed, at last, that no man, whatever his capaci- 
ties or claims, who was in the least adverse to 
that interest, was allowed to hold the lowest 
office of profit or honor under the general gov- 
ernment, and much less to achieve any of its 



NORTHERN OR SOUTHERN. WHICH? 287 

higher places. It is true, at this hour, that 
the most illustrious poet of his country, that 
its most illustrious historian, that its most 
illustrious philosopher, that its most illustri- 
ous novelist (were she a man) could not be 
made a gate-keeper of the public grounds at 
Washington, if he desired to be ; and all for 
the simple reason, that having formed a differ- 
ent theory of social life from the one which 
obtains at the South, he has been honest 
enough to express it. Even the most eminent 
statesmen of former days — our Jeffersons, our 
Franklins, our Jays, and our Adamses — could 
they arise from their graves, and write what 
they once wrote, would be excluded forever 
from political employment. The men of the 
North, who are born to freedom, who are cra- 
dled to rest by the songs of its surges as they 
roll in from the lakes and oceans, who inhale 
it with every breath blown from their eternal 
hills, and who, should they fliil to extol it, 
would be recreant to the earliestand deepest 
inspirations of their lives, are begirt by an in- 
tolerance more exclusive than the ostracism of 
the Athenian demos, or the interdicts of the 



288 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

mediaeval papacy. The men of New England 
and New York, of Oliio and Wisconsin, are 
yet called upon to adopt the peculiar senti- 
ments of men of Georgia and Texas, or at 
least to hold their tongues from the temerity 
of criticism or disapproval, on pain of political 
banishment. Let them but once whisper 
abroad any disparagement of slavery, though 
it were in the friendliest tone, w^itli the sin- 
cerest convictions, under an earnest and con- 
scientious sense of its important bearings, and 
straightway they are marked men. 

Now, against this they contend and protest ; 
it is a dictation so arrogant, that to submit to 
it would be to deserve it ; and every impulse 
of self-respect, honor, and liberty prompts them 
to avoid that humiliation. 

The more immediate and pressing aspect of 
the great controversy, however, is that which 
relates to the future destiny of the territories. 
It presents this simple alternative — whether, 
contrasting the effects of the free condition of 
society with those of the slave, we ought to 
abandon our virgin soils to the occupation of 
the one, or solemnly consecrate them to the 



NORTHERN OR SOUTHERN, WHICH? 289 

use of the other? As a nation, we have had a 
broad and ample experience of the influences 
of both systems on the prosperity of states, 
and we are summoned to a decision between 
them. In this view, the question is one, we 
repeat, not of races, nor of abstract theories of 
rights, nor even of religious convictions (al- 
though all these will influence the decision), 
but of actual facts. Demonstrated before us, 
lie the results of two social experiments, and 
we are asked, in the light of those demonstra- 
tions, to determine which it is best to apply, in 
the formation of our young and inchoate com- 
munities. A brood of such communities is 
growing up under our fostering wings; our 
duty is, to launch them in the world, as a good 
parent would send forth his sons, furnished 
with the best appliances for a healthful, sober, 
manly, and generous career; and the choice 
lies in this — whether that furniture shall come 
from the pens and plantations of slavery, or 
from the factories and free-schools of freedom. 

There could be no better illustration of the 
proper solution of this problem, than the expe- 
riences of the two states, which lately ap- 
13 



290 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

peared, through their representatives, in the 
congressional arena, as the standard-bearers of 
either party. Massachusetts and South Caro- 
lina are both old, and both Sea-board states, 
which took a conspicuous part in our revolu- 
tionary war ; which were present at the forma- 
tion of the Constitution; which have since 
grown, side by side, under their characteristic 
systems ; which cling, with great tenacity, to 
the principles of these, and which are remarka- 
ble for the vigor with which they represent 
their effects. At the outset. South Carolina 
was about four times as large Massachusetts, 
territorially, and is still ; but this advantage is 
partly compensated by the fact, that Massa- 
chusetts began with about one-third more to- 
tal population. Massachusetts, however, was 
democratically organized into a system of sepa- 
rate, and almost independent townships, each 
a centre of government in itself, while South 
Carolina, from the necessity of the case, was 
centrally organized into parishes, having little 
or no local authority, and, for the most part, 
dependent on the principal, or state govern- 
ment. The people of Massachusetts have re- 



NORTHERN OR SOUTHERN, WHICH? 291 

tained that organization, and with it, the most 
entire freedom of every inhabitant ; while the 
people of South Carolina have also, with slight 
modifications, retained their system, and with 
it, the servitude of nearly the whole laboring 
class. Now, what have been the effects, on 
the prosperity of each, of these two contrasted 
constitutions? 

The elements of national greatness, in their 
three-fold material, intellectual and moral forms, 
are universally summed up under the heads of 
population, productive industry, the diffusion 
of wealth, internal improvement, popular edu- 
cation, and social order. But who, that has 
ever traveled over the two states we are con- 
sidering, or taken the pains to compare their 
statistics, as given in the usual authorities, can 
have failed to remark their broad and striking 
differences, in all these respects? Supposing 
their social systems equally well adapted to 
their respective localities and the genius of 
their people, how notable the disparity in the 
practical results ! 

On the one part, we behold a considerable 
progress ; but on that of the other, a prodigious 



292 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

one. On the one side, we behold a large and 
fertile soil, under a delicious climate, thinly- 
peopled and poorly cultivated ; and, on the 
other, a barren soil, under inclement skies, 
teeming with towns and cities, and cultivated 
to the extreme. On the one side, the industry, 
though productive, is, in many respects, care- 
less, thriftless, improvident, and confined to a 
few branches which increase slowly; while, on 
the other, the productiveness of the industry- 
exceeds that of any part of the globe, except- 
ing a few sugar and coffee estates of the torrid 
zone, and is richly varied, and advancing. On 
the one side is a slender commerce ; and, on 
the other, a commerce which sweeps the seas. 
On the one side are bad roads, and few of 
them ; while, on the other, is a chevaux dc 
frisc of railroads. On the one side is a puny 
and unprolific intellectual activity ; and, on the 
other, an intellectual activity which leaves no 
child untaught, and scarcely a man unlettered. 
On the one side is a society irrevocably divided 
into castes, where a debased and inferior race 
grows in numbers and strength, to the increas- 
ing embarrassment of the superior race, and 



NORTHERN OR SOUTHERN, WHICH? 



293 



amidst the derision of the civilized world ; 
while, on the other, is a homogeneous society, 
where every man enjoys the means of the high- 
est culture and the securest happiness, and the 
future expands and brightens with new pros- 
pects of social achievement.* Every year is 

* The following table is compiled from the last Census, 
with the exception of the " Agricultural Products," which 
is Mr. Tucker's estimate for 1840 : 





MASSACHU'S. 


SOUTH CAROLINA. 


Population, . . . . 


994,514 


668,507 


Real and pei'sonal estate, 


$573,342,286 


$288,267,694 


Acres improved, 


2,133,436 


4,072,651 


Acres unimproved, 


1,222,576 


12,145,049 


Cash value of farms, 


.$109,076,347 


$82,431,684 


Agricultural products, . 


$16,100,000 


$21,550,000 


Manufacture and mining, 


$151,137,145 


$7,063,513 


Imports, 


.$41,367,956 


$1,808,517 


Exports, 


$16,895,304 


$15,400,408 


Tonnage, .... 


32,715,327 


2,081,312 


Rail-road costs, .... 


$55,602,687 


$11,287,093 


Value produced to each person. 


$106 


$50 


Free-schools, . , ... 


3,679 


724 


Private schools, 


403 


202 


Scholars in all, 


190,924 


26.025 


Papers and periodicals, 


64,820,564 


7,145,930 copies 


Illiterate white natives, . 


1,861 


16,460 


Libraries, 


684,015 


107,472 vols. 


Churches, .... 


1,477 


1,182 


Church property. 


$10,206,184 


$2,172,246 



As to the crime and pauperism of the two states, no ma- 
terials exist for an accurate comparison ; but if we may 
trust the statement of Governor Hammond, in his address to 
the South Carolina Institute, there are no less than 50,000 
whites (one-sixth of the white population), "whose industry 
is not adequate to their support. They obtain a precarious 
subsistence by hunting, fishing, pkmdering fields and folds, 
and trading with slaves." For fui^ther facts in regard to 



294 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

plunging South Carolina into deeper troubles 
and dangers, from which her most sagacious 
and even hopeful minds see no escape but civil 
war ; while every year is lifting Massachusetts 
toward a more secure and benignant eminence 
of Christian civilization. 

Our argument does not mean to assert that 
South Carolina ought to adopt the institutions 
of Massachusetts, because w^e have no occasion 
to go into such an inquiry here ; but what it 
does assert is this, that if a high degree of pros- 
perity be desirable to a nation, if a thriving 
population, if universal industry, if the rapid 
increase and equitable diffusion of wealth, if 
general improvement, if education and religion, 
in short, if a harmonious growth and widening 
prospects for the future, be the tests of that 
prosperity, then the institutions of Massachu- 
setts are vastly better in themselves, and in 
respect to all communities in which they are 
practicable, than the institutions of South Caro- 
lina. We say, that the experience of these 

the physical and moral abasement of South Carolina, see 
Mr. Olmsted's interesting and masterly book, called " The 
Seaboard Slave States." New York, 1856. 



NORTHERN OR SOUTHERN, WHICH? 295 

states has shown, incontestably, the superiority 
of thd free condition of society, and that we, as 
honest patriots and Christian men, are bound, 
by all human wisdom, and all divine law, to 
prefer those institutions, where either may be 
adopted, as in our new territories. We are 
bound to secure to our friends and descendants 
in those regions, to which, under our guardian- 
ship, they have removed, every highest guar- 
anty and facility of future well-being. 

But the superiority of free society, so sig- 
nally exhibited in the contrasts of the two 
great and powerful states we have named, is 
confirmed by the experience of all the states. 
The relative position of the free states, com- 
pared with the slave states, is accurately de- 
noted by the relations of Massachusetts and 
South Carolina. Free society is always on the 
lead ; and one of the established principles of 
political economy is, that it must be so — that 
it cannot be otherwise ; that God would be 
forgetful of the laws he has implanted in the 
human constitution, and in the universe, if he 
did not render freedom the most benignant of 
all conditions. Mr. Henry C. Carey, in a most 



29G POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

valuable book of liis,* has shown, by a rigid 
induction from the statistics of four nations — 
India, France, England, and the United States 
— that in everything which involves the suc- 
cess, the happiness, and the moral elevation of 
their people, their eminence is in a precise 
ratio to their political freedom. He proves, 
specifically, and beyond a doubt, that, in re- 
spect to the security of person and property ; 
in respect to quantity and quality of work ; in 
respect to the profits of capital, and the wages 
of labor ; in respect to the equable distribution 
of wealth, and exemption from taxes ; in re- 
spect to the soundness and extension of credit; 
in respect to facility of intercourse, and habits 
of industry ; in respect to purity of marriage 
and growth of population ; in respect to the 
absence of crime, and even of disease ; and, 
finally, in respect to literary and religious in- 
struction, the condition of nations is measured 
by their freedom. It is such an overwhelming 
demonstration, as no defender of despotism, in 
any of its shapes, has ever undertaken to re- 
fute, or even cared to notice. Yet a similar 
* Principles of Political Ecouomv, 3 vols. 



NORTHERN OR SOUTHERN, WHICH? 297 

demonstration is possible, in regard to the free 
and slave states of this Union. It can be 
shown tliat a clear line of distinction separates 
the two, in all these elements of high civiliza- 
tion. And how could it be otherwise? The 
condition of slavery, confining its laborious 
classes, for the most part, to simple agricultu- 
ral labor, does not stimulate, and scarcely 
admits of that variety and magnificence of pro- 
duct, which is the mark of high physical de- 
velopment, whilst it is still more deficient in 
the means of intellectual and moral progress. 
Its superior class often attains the most ele- 
vated point, both of character and culture, but 
its masses, with here and there an indi- 
vidual exception, cannot rise above the lowest 
level. 

All this, however, needs no protracted dis- 
cussion. Do not the nine hundred and ninety- 
nine men, out of every thousand, at the North, 
honestly believe, that a free society is, in every 
sense, preferable to a slave society"? Are there 
not thousands upon thousands at the south, 
who believe the same thing, who openly con- 
fess the superiority of the former, and justify 
13* 



298 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

the continuation of the Latter solely upon the 
ground, that it was an unavoidable inheritance, 
of which it is now difficult, if not impossible, 
to get relieved? 

The only exceptions that we know to this 
almost universal conviction, are the opinions 
held by a few southern speculators, who, fol- 
lowing the lead of Mr. Calhoun, have discov- 
ered the most alarming weaknesses in free 
society. They see in it a thousand elements 
of evil — ^in its relations of labor and capital, a 
future war between the rich and poor — in its 
excitability, the seeds of a desolating fanati- 
cism, and in its party violences, a most speedy 
anarchy. Poor fellows ! They seem to be af- 
flicted with a judicial blindness! 

No observant man is, of course, insensible 
to the many lingering defects and evils of our 
free society. If he have studied it minutely, 
he will not regard it as by any means perfect 
or final: yet, on the comparison of it with 
other societies, and after every abatement, he 
will come to a quite positive conclusion, that 
it contains facilities for reaching every imagin- 
able social excellence, greater than any other 



NOKTIIEKN OH SOUTUERN, WHICH? 299 

that now exists. Taken as to the general re- 
sult, he will see, that the civilization of our 
free states is not only considerably in advance 
of that of any other part of the globe, but is 
of such a structure and spirit that it will con- 
tinue, for many years yet, to keep in advance. 
What civilization can be named its superior? 
That of Turkey, Russia, Italy, Austria, Spain 
— the simple suggestion is ludicrous! Outside 
of England, France, and the north of Germany, 
w^iich surpass us in certain special aspects, 
there are no nations to be named on the same 
day with New England, the northern middle 
states, and the settled parts of the West. We 
do not mean that these have actually achieved 
all the finer results of European life ; but that, 
apart from their own peculiar attainments, 
they are in a condition to appropriate the high- 
est existing social culture. Without sacrificing 
their characteristic virtues, they are rapidly 
adopting the best refinements of others. No- 
where else do literature and art spread so 
widely among the people ; and nowhere else is 
domestic life so readily blending the genialities 
and graces of intercourse (before impossible to 



300 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

its newness and rawness) with that purity 
which it always had and still retains. 

The forms of our free society, being alike 
flexible and fixed, preserve the security of law, 
while they give ample scope to the movements 
of progress. That dissolution, especially, which 
the aforesaid speculators fondly predict for it, 
in consequence of its fanaticisms and turbu- 
lences, is an event the most remote ; for its 
very freedom is its defense, and the errors 
which arise in it, like the vapors of the night, are 
dissipated in the morning by the light of free 
discussion. When the mind is exempted from 
compressive restraints, its natural activity is 
displayed in novel schemes of thought as well 
as in mechanical contrivance ; projects of re- 
form of all kinds are as inseparable from it as 
business enterprise ; and like a rich soil which 
produces the best fruits, it also abounds in 
plentiful crops of* weeds. All the excitements 
of it, however, all its ism and vagaries, are 
scarcely felt as evils. Beyond the temporary 
ferment they occasion, no one is the worse for 
them, while these ferments may be themselves 
regarded as the outlets of irritation that might 



NORTHERN OR SOUTHERN, WHICII ? 301 

otherwise be deep and dangerous. It is the 
forced suppression of social energies, and not 
the ventihition of them, which leads to perni- 
cious revolts. For this reason, therefore, we 
have no fear of the imputed lawlessness of free 
society — a danger to which, in its peculiar con- 
stitution, slave-society seems to us far more 
exposed. Dr. Arnold somewhere remarks w^ith 
profound wisdom, that "the age of chivalry, 
whose departure Burke so much regretted, was 
the natural parent of that age of Jacobinism 
which he so much abhorred." He meant that 
both breathe a spirit of hostility to order, en- 
couraging men to look upon themselves as in- 
dependent of their fellows, and cultivating a 
proud and selfish idolatry of what belongs to 
themselves individually, whether it be personal 
honor or personal glory, as in the one form of 
the disease, or personal liberty and equity, as in 
the other. Both lead to what Bacon calls ho- 
mim suitatis to the neglect of the good of the 
general body. True as this is of a genuine 
chivalry, it is still more true of that spurious 
sort which springs out of slavery, and which 
breeds a haughty, insolent, and irritable self- 



302 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

conceit — intractable to law, and disdaining so- 
cial subordination. It is in southern society 
that personal and mobocratic violence is rifest 
— it is there that schemes of filibusterism are 
principally engendered — and there that the 
threat of taking up arms against the Union is a 
favorite method of discussion. 

In the elements of stability as well as of 
prosperity, then, the social organization of the 
North enjoys an unquestionable superiority 
over that of the South ; and we do not see 
how any rational or humane man can hesitate 
as to which is the most desirable for a new re- 
gion. If the question concerned a community 
already settled, in which the habits had been 
formed, and large amounts of property were 
invested in a definite condition of things, the 
determination of it might be more embarrass- 
ing ; but our western territories are a primi- 
tive, untrodden ground — no vested interests ex- 
ist there to be disturbed — no ancient prejudices 
to be aroused — and no hoar}^ abuses to be 
overthrown. All is fresh, and new, and unper- 
verted ; nothing stands between the judgment 
of what is best for them, the actual truths of 



NO!rrin::ix on southern, which? 303 

experience and reason, and the instant applica- 
tion of tliem. Now, in such circumstances, to 
doom them, for years to come, to an inferior 
social system, full of confessed weaknesses, full 
of hopeless evils, full of disastrous liabilities 
and perils, would be treating them with a 
cruelty which a brute would be ashamed of 
towards its young. 

But, unfortunately, the politicians, ever dis- 
inclined to contemplate political movements in 
their larger and humaner aspects, always con- 
trive to complicate them with divergent or 
collateral issues. They will not look at them in 
the light of a sound political and social philoso- 
phy, as matters w^hich may control the happi- 
ness and stamp the character of unborn millions, 
and to the decision of which a man should bring, 
not his selfish cunning, but his maturest wisdom, 
and his most generous sympathies ; but they 
look at them, almost exclusively, as they bear 
on the distributions of power and their own 
prospects of advancement. It has fallen to 
this question of the organization of our ter- 
ritories to be decided quite on these grounds. 
Among the politicians of the South, it has be- 



304 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

come a desperate struggle foi- the retention of 
their ascendancy, and among those of the North, 
a desperate gamble for success ; and between 
the two, the people of the United States have 
been cheated out of their rightful control of 
their dependencies ; and the people of the 
territories themselves subjected to a series of 
the most atrocious outrages. 

In the whole history of our legislation, there 
is not another so barefaced, flagitious, and reck- 
less a course of proceeding as that which ini- 
tiated, accompanied, and has followed the repeal 
of the Missouri compromise. We doubt, indeed, 
whether any legislation of any civilized coun- 
try, this side of the French revolution, has been 
marked by such an utter want of principle, 
and at the same time been so pregnant with 
dangerous consequences. Wresting from the 
representatives of the people, under false pre- 
tenses, and on the ground of a mere abstrac- 
tion, their long-settled right of legislating for 
the territories, to confer it upon chance-comers, 
the authors and abettors of squatter sovereign- 
ty no sooner saw it in exercise than they 
hastened to suppress it by fire and sword. 



NORTHERN OR SOUTHERN, WHICH"? 305 

Flinging out the prize of a splendid empire, to 
be won by a scramble between the two parts 
of the Union, already inflamed and hostile, they 
have brought us to the verge of a fratricidal 
war. Imdting the settlement and organization 
of the territories by the people of all the states, 
they have let loose the wild hordes of the bor- 
der upon a particular class of them, and de- 
nounced the penalties of treason against their 
action as freemen. Beginning in fraud, they 
have ended in force. 

It is in the power of the Congress, however, 
to pass the crisis, by a ready recognition of the 
claims of Kansas, as a free state. Her action, 
like that of Arkansas, Michigan, and California, 
which furnish appropriate precedents, has been 
somewhat irregular, but in no respect treason- 
able. Her people, provoked by every incite- 
ment to extremities, have deported themselves 
with temper and discretion. Tliey are not com- 
pelled even to ask, that " something should be 
pardoned to the spirit of liberty ;" but are amply 
justified in resting their case on its naked 
merits. Let it be treated with a manly and 
truthful independence, and let those, whose 



306 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

duty it is to dispose of it, or to act in the mat- 
ter in any way, remember the profound saying 
of Emerson : " Never, my friend, never strike 
sail to a fear. Come into port grandly, or sail 
with God the seas." 



KANSAS MUST BE FREE. 

No man, who is not an enemy of this coun- 
try, can look upon its present political strug- 
gle with other feelings than those of shame, in- 
dignation, and alarm ; of shame, because we pre- 
sent to the civilized world the spectacle of a 
great, free republic, almost rent asunder by a 
contest on the subject of human slavery ; of 
indignation, because our men in power have 
committed, and are committing, a series of the 
very grossest outrages against the dictates of 
prudence, as well as of justice and freedom; 
and of alarm, because there seems to be no 
probable issue to the conflict but in civil war. 

For nearly seventy years now, the delicate 
experiment of self-government, instituted on 
this western continent, has more than justified 
the hopes of its authors. It has been, in every 
sense, a most successful experiment. Every 
object which it is possible or desirable for a 



308 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

good government to attain, has been attained 
by our federation of republics. Peace, security, 
content, wealth, happiness, have follov^ed its 
operations, with an amplitude and fullness of 
fruition that were never before witnessed. 
Neither Sparta, nor Athens, nor Rome, nor the 
British Empire, nor Russia, nor any other na- 
tion, noted in the annals of mankind for e^rlj 
maturity, has exhibited such an astonishing 
growth, in all the elements of national great- 
ness, as has been exhibited by the United 
States of North America. Other states have 
taken centuries to consolidate their power, and 
even to secure their existence, while w^e have 
sprung at once, as if by miracle, into the most 
flourishing vigor. Our territory, wdthin the 
short period of our independence, has quadru- 
pled in extent ; our population has expanded 
tenfold ; our commerce equals that of the mis- 
tress of the seas ; and our attainments in intelli- 
gence and virtue compare favorably with those 
of the most civilized of the European nations. 

During this time of unexampled advance and 
felicity, but one question has arisen among us, 
likely, from the nature of it, to interrupt the 



KANSAS MUST BE FREE. 309 

harmonious continuance of this happy condi- 
tion. There have been many severe and earn- 
est conflicts in the proceedings of our political 
parties — much excitement, much acrimonious 
feeling, and some dangerous revolts — but the 
question of slavery alone has become a touch- 
stone of our vitality. Great and intense as 
may have been the commotions caused by 
other matters of difference, they have been 
easily settled, either by a clear preponderance 
of opinion on one side or the other, or by sea- 
sonable compromise. No one of them has ever 
been deemed of sufficient importance, to hazard 
the peace of the Union upon any particular de- 
termination of it. When it had been thorough- 
ly discussed, when parties had divided upon it, 
when the usual bitterness of party warfare had 
exhausted itself in intrigue and denunciation — 
the vote was taken and the people acquiesced 
in the result. Once clearly decided, there was 
an end to the debate. Hostilities were sus- 
pended, and the country went on its way in 
peace, until some new conjuncture of aifairs 
presented the opportunity for new combina- 
tions and new conflicts. Thus, the question 



310 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

between federalism and state rights distracted 
us for a time, but gradually passed away. 
Thus, the internal improvement question, and 
the tariff question, and the national bank ques- 
tion, and the Texas question, have led to heat- 
ed controversies, and subsided. And thus, it 
was supposed that by the compromises of 1S20, 
and 1850, the deeper question of slavery, after 
embroiling us for years, had been peacefully 
adjusted. 

But, in this respect, a terrible mistake was 
committed. All the events of the day show 
that the slavery question has not been adjusted. 
The contest in regard to it rages with more ve- 
hemence than ever. Every part of the nation 
is excited, aroused, maddened by it ; is, indeed, 
almost up in arms. Persons, who have hither- 
to, on account of their professions, or from 
indifterence, kept aloof from politics, are deeply 
engaged in it ; our pulpits resound with it ; 
our literature is filled with it ; the extremes of 
feeling have passed over into violence and 
bloodshed ; and the boldest, as well as the 
most timid minds, begin to ask, What is to be 
the end ? 



KANSAS MUST BE FREE. 311 

It is of some moment, then, to inquire into 
the causes of this ferment and anxiety. Why- 
is the agitation of this question more pervading 
and active than that of any other ? Why are 
the debates of Congress fuller of exasperation 
than ever before? Why are the newspapers 
so vituperative and truculent ? Why are the 
villages of Kansas ablaze at midnight from the 
torch of the incendiary, and v^hy is a senator 
smitten down from his very seat in our highest 
hall of legislation? 

Our first reply is, that slavery is a system of 
such peculiar nature, that it scarcely allows 
of rational discussion. When it is discussed at 
all, either in the way of attack or defense, it 
inevitably leads to a distempered expression of 
feelings. Among those by whom it is opposed, 
it is regarded as a practice at once too mean 
and criminal to admit of extenuation. Touch- 
ing their profoundest religious sensibilities by 
what is esteemed its flagrant violation of the 
very idea of manhood, and appealing to the 
tenderest sentiments of natural compassion by 
the sufferings ascribed to its victims, their con- 
victions against it easily inflame into passion- 



312 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

ate hostility. They cannot conceive how free 
men — and, above all, Christian men, who ought 
to see a brother in every human being — can 
consent to doom the least of their fellows to a 
remediless bondage, a bondage which shuts him 
out forever, not only from the means, but from 
the hope, of all progressive civilization. They 
are incensed by the thought. The ordinary in- 
justices of society they can excuse, because 
they are always partial in ther extent, and 
never linal in their effects ; but this master- 
wrong, embracing an entire race in its evils, 
and looking forward to no probable ameliora- 
tion, swells into an enormity of offense which 
it is impossible for their charity to pardon. 
As aggravations of this general sense of the 
turpitude of the thing, occasional instances of 
abuse arise ; some refractory subject is tortur- 
ed at the stake, or some panting fugitive is torn 
by blood-hounds, and then the primitive feeling 
is kindled into a fiery indignation. The vials 
of an unmeasured wrath are opened upon the 
slaveholder; no terms of reproach seem too 
severe for him ; his conduct is arraigned as of 
a piece with that of the Thug, the vampire, or 



KANSAS MUST BE FREE. 313 

the pirate ; and lie is morally gibbeted before 
the world as the proper object of hatred and 
scorn. As long, then, as slavery continues to 
exist, and liunian sympathies remain what they 
are, it will continue to be opposed. It will 
be, also, violently opposed. Men of philosophic 
temper, who have learned from history how 
much every social institution is to be judged 
relatively, or according to circumstances, may 
be disposed to qualify their opinions ; they may 
lament the savage and intolerant spirit in which 
those w^ho are mingled up with it are assailed, 
but the many make no such distinctions or al- 
lowances. They judge of all things on broad 
and absolute principles. They perceive in 
slavery a manifest wrong done to our common 
humanity, and they denounce that wrong ex- 
plicitly, without niceness of phrase and with- 
out meal in the mouth. Ever since the two 
great iniluences of Christianity and Democra- 
cy have been practically received in society — 
the one proclaiaiing the right of all men to 
S[)iritu;il, and the other the right of all men to 
temporal, liberty — there has been a growing 

revolt against it — a revolt which, in stern or 
14 



314 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

excitable natures, deepens into the intensest 
animosit}^ 

On the other side, these assaults are met in 
a spirit of resentful and arrogant detiance. 
The excited slaveholder, conceiving his rights 
to be attacked — fearing, too, the dangerous 
consequences of any tampering with them — 
repulses even more fiercely than he is attacked. 
Could the vast pecuniary interests — the incal- 
culable social liabilities which, in his belief, de- 
pend upon the continuance of his authority — 
suffer him to be moderate, the habits of domin- 
ion in which he is trained would not. It is 
one of the necessities of his position that 
he should be quick to resent. Accustomed 
to an unquestioning obedience, he is easily 
aroused by any show of opposition. But let 
that opposition spread widel)^ and take a some- 
what angry and vindictive shape, he is obliged 
to rage against it rather than to reason. " A 
despot," says Aristotle, " whenever he ascends 
the throne, takes a wild beast with him ;" and 
the slaveholder is a despot in a small way. 
He possesses an unlimited power of control 
over a number of his fellow-beings ; and it is 



KANSAS MUST BE FREE. 315 

the universal testimony of history, that where 
such a power is exercised, while in rare cases 
it develops a kindly condescension and an af- 
fectionate and gentle discipline, it betrays 
most men into an impatient self-will and petu- 
lance. " The whole commerce between master 
and slave," says Jefferson, " is a perpetual ex- 
ercise of the most boisterous passions." As 
slavery originates in violence, as the poor Afri- 
can is torn from his home by violence, is trans- 
ported across the seas by violence, and is sent 
to this land or that by violence, so he can be 
retained in his subjection only by violence. 
The master is compelled to assert his authority 
by force, in one shape or another, and the habit 
of asserting it passes more or less into his 
whole conduct. Because he may not make 
concessions to his slave with safety to his sys- 
tem, he cannot make concessions to those who 
would plead the cause of the slave. Every in- 
terference, even of the law or of opinion, 
becomes an impertinence. He must reign 
supreme over these, as he does over the plant- 
ation, or quit the grounds of his power. As- 
serting a right of property in his servant, he 



316 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

claims that almost absolute disposal of it which 
pertains to the idea of property. Yet he can- 
not trust it to the ordinary safeguards of prop- 
erty ; for it is a peculiar species, inflammable, 
locomotive, furtive, and, sometimes, given to 
strike. It must be protected, therefore, by 
provisions that would elsewhere seem fanatical 
in their severity. When other property is as- 
sailed, society contents itself with the lenient 
punishment of the offender ; but when this pe- 
culiar species is assailed, even by word, the 
offense swells into the gigantic proportions of 
a capital crime, and the offender is placed on a 
level with the incendiary and the murderer. 
Other kinds of property may be debated by the 
publicist or the editor, its abuses exposed, and 
the legitimacy of it even called in question, 
but this kind asserts for itself an inviohable 
sanctity. It must not be touched at the peril 
of life. Even public opinion, wherever it pre- 
vails, is benumbed by it into silent acquies- 
cence ; and a surveillance, as subtle and swift 
as that of any of the Roman Cciesars, watches 
over its safety, and smites the remotest malcon- 
tent with paralysis. 



KANSAS MUST BE FREE. 317 

Now, a controversy between the anti-slave- 
ry feeling, such as we have described it, and 
a body of men placed and educated as slave- 
holders are, will not be confined to a pleasant 
exchange of words. On the one side are radi- 
cal, religious, and social convictions, inflamed 
to a pitch of fanaticism ; and, on the other, vari- 
ous impulses of interest, prejudice, fear, and ha- 
bitual domination concentrated into an aggres- 
sive resentment. How can the encounter of 
the two fail to be a fierce and internecine war, 
animated by the most vehement passions, and 
lookincr forward to no close but the moral con- 
quest of one or the other ? Were the question 
simply abstract, like a theological tenet, or a 
scientific hypothesis, this diversity of sentiment 
would lead to conflict ; but it happens in this 
country that the antagonism is related to the 
deepest practical considerations. The slavery 
question is one of political power as well as 
of interest — it is one of conflicting civilizations 
as well as of conflicting opinion — one in which 
not only the present character, but the future 
destiny of the whole country is involved. 
The peculiarity of our political structure, 



318 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

therefore, may be assigned as a second cause 
of the vivacity and vital import of the pre- 
vailing contest. Our constitution has coupled 
together into a kind of wedlock two different 
orders of society — the one ancient and patri- 
archal, the other hoyden and capricious — com- 
posed essentially of the same races — yet differ- 
ing widely in institutions, tendencies, and aims. 
While they were actuated by the original im- 
pulse of their union — which was the achieve- 
ment of a national independence, and the 
establishment of national power — they main- 
tained a delightful harmony. They caressed 
and fondled each other with all the ardor of 
young lovers. They relieved each other's bur- 
dens, encouraged each other's virtues, and look- 
ed forward complacently to years of increasing 
happiness, and a long line of descendants. 
But these early fervors could not disguise the 
secret existence of serious distemperatures. 
In the progress of the domestic management, 
there occurred little bickerino^s and tiffs, wliich 
disclosed a somewhat deep-seated incompati- 
bility. It began to be felt, more and more, 
that, between a social life founded upon free- 



KANSAS MUST BE FREE. 319 

dom, and one founded upon slavery, there 
must arise, unless prevented by an almost mi- 
raculous self-restraint on the part of both, in- 
cessant causes of discord. It began to be 
seen, that the control of the federal power, and 
by means of that of the character of the ter- 
ritories, would constitute a splendid prize for 
the contentious adjutancy of the two parts. 
Those vast and lucrative trusts, inseparable 
from the central head, and the power to be 
wielded in a thousand forms, through its many 
functions, were temptations of too extraordi- 
nary a nature to be resisted by the average po- 
litical virtue of the best people. Accordingly, 
they have become the rock on which, if any, 
we shall split. It is universally acknowledged, 
that they must be administered in the interests 
and for the ends of slavery, or in the interests 
and for the ends of freedom. Slavery and 
freedom cannot both be national. The spirit, 
the impulse, the aspirations of one or the 
other must prevail. If slavery is not a local 
thing, peculiar to some of the states, then free- 
dom is local and peculiar, and must withdraw 
more and more from the dispensation of office 



320 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

and the control of legislation. No nation can 
serve two masters. If the policy of slavery 
gets the ascendant, the public demeanor must 
be different from what it would be if the poli- 
cy of freedom preponderated. Without im- 
puting to either side any wanton inclination to 
molest the rights of the other, it is clear, from 
the inherent necessities of the two systems of 
society, that they must operate in quite differ- 
ent directions. Shivery, at the best, is the 
government of a dominant and privileged class, 
and cannot fully sympathize wdth the broader 
life of a whole people. Free society, on the 
contrary, is buoyant with every pulse of popu- 
lar feeling. It is built upon the original idea 
of our Revolution — the idea of free and equal 
rights. It is pervaded by the democratic senti- 
ment, which, towards the close of the eiffht- 
eenth century, spread over the civilized world, 
and created a new epoch in the history of man- 
kind. But the other system, for the most part, 
has w^andered from these primitive aspirations. 
Under the leadership of Mr. Calhoun and his 
school, it has substituted a dogma about the 
natural superiority of certain races for the old 



KANSAS MUST BE FJIEE. 321 

doctrine of democratic equality. It concerns 
itself less with humanity, and more with phy- 
siology. It has learned to defend the subju- 
gation of labor as a just and normal condition ; 
and its proclivities tend to the perpetuation, 
not the amelioration, of the anomalies of its 
social existence. 

Thus, we find our confederacy divided into 
two parts — fifteen members of it, with a white 
population of about six millions, on the one 
hand — and sixteen members, with a white 
population of thirteen millions, on the other — 
face to face with each other, in a severe strug- 
gle for the mastery. With the one is the weight 
of numbers, wealth, enterprise, intelligence, 
and exemption from domestic dangers, but the 
other enjoys a superiority in the possession of 
the organized forces of government, in direct- 
ness of purpose, and in compactness and energy 
of action. The prestige of past successes is 
with the South — the supine and cautious con- 
servatism of the nation is with it ; the restless, 
excitable avidity of foreign conquests, by a 
strange juxtaposition, is also with it ; but the 
conscience of the nation is against it ; the 

14* 



322 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

literature is against it ; the probabilities of the 
future, founded upon the natural increase of 
numbers and the growth of opinion, are against 
it ; and, on this last account, it feels through 
all its joints that it must conquer now or 
never. Indeed, it is obvious to both parties, 
that the great conflict is drawing to a head, 
and that the coming presidential election will 
precipitate a decision. That event, at all times 
bristling with excitements, is invested with a 
new and tremendous import, by its bearing 
upon deeper ulterior issues. It is marshaling 
the two orders of civilization to a final en- 
counter ; already the sullen clouds of the storm 
are flashing their menaces, and discharging their 
bolts along the remote western horizon — com- 
paratively harmless as yet, but filling the air 
with a vague and restless foreboding of evil. 

But this allusion leads us to remark, that 
while the slavery dispute is so irritable and 
petulant in itself, and is bound up with such 
profound collateral issues, there is a third and 
special cause for the existing aggravations in 
the flagitious course which the politicians have 
pursued towards Kansas. That rich and beau- 



KANSAS MUST HE FREE. 323 

tiful territory, larger than the kingdom of 
Great Britain, and equal in area to the Aus- 
trian and Frencli empires, the geographical 
centre of tlie western continent, is also the 
pivot of its most vital and determinative con- 
troversy. It is no extravagance to say, that 
what the plains of Iran w^ere to western Asia 
— what France is to Europe — this region of 
Kansas will be to the great Valley of the West. 
It holds the key to the entire and gigantic 
civilization which shall soon fill up those soli- 
tudes. There lie the granaries of the New 
World ; and thence shall spring the seats of 
future empire. For years to come, it will be 
the goal of that stupendous migration flowing 
from the exhausted East, and for years again, 
from its capacious w^omb shall proceed the 
busy millions destined to redeem or to disgrace 
the extensive fields beyond. Like a great in- 
land lake — which receives the many streams 
of the mountains, and pours them forth again 
in mighty rivers — Kansas will color both what 
it takes and what it gives, and become the 
source of a beneficent fertility, or a remediless 
blight. 



324 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

For nearly half a century this pregnant cen- 
tre was consecrated hi perpetuity, by a solemn 
act of legislation, to freedom — an act which, as 
Mr. Douglas said in his Springfield speech of 
1849, " received the sanction of all parties in 
every section of the Union." "It had its ori- 
gin," he continues, " in the hearts of all pa- 
triotic men who desired to preserve and per- 
petuate the blessings of our glorious Union^ 
an origin akin to that of the constitution of 
the United States, conceived in the same spirit 
of fraternal affection, and calculated to remove 
forever the only danger which seemed to threat- 
en, at some distant day, to sever the social bond 
of union. All the evidences of public opinion 
at that day seemed to indicate that this com- 
promise had become canonized in the hearts 
of the American people as a sacred thing, 
which no ruthless hand would be ever reckless 
enough to disturb." But, in 1854, that " ruth- 
less hand" was raised. AlthouGfh it was not 
demanded by any exigency of state, uncalled 
for by a single voice among the people, it was 
recklessly raised by Mr. Douglas himself, in the 
lowest spirit of demagogery. 



KANSAS MUST BE FREE. 325 

The bulwarks, which had beaten back the 
billows of a lifetime, were thrown down on the 
pretense of the abstract right of each locality 
to the sovereign disposal of its own affairs — a 
pretense which, if it had been well founded, 
was then purely gratuitous. The eftect was, 
to fling away this magnificent domain to a rab- 
ble of competitors. As the Roman empire, in 
the days of its degeneracy, was sold to the 
highest bidder, so this empire of the future 
experienced the more degrading fate of aban- 
donment to the mob. All the riff-raff of the bor- 
ders — men of rude and violent natures, regard- 
less of principles, and avid of plunder — were in- 
vited, along with soberer citizens, to a pell-mell 
scramble for the prize. The world saw, with 
astonishment, a great republic surrendering its 
right to the control of its dependencies, sur- 
rendering its noble prerogative of fixing the 
character of inchoate and unsettled communi- 
ties, to the precarious arbitrament of a miscel- 
laneous herd of first comers. It saw the few 
honest and legitimate settlers, who, taking 
their fortune in their hands, had gone thither 
with an exalted purpose of founding a state 



326 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

worthy of the most advanced modern civiliza- 
tion, overwhelmed, in their very first attempts 
at organization, not by the red savages of" the 
wilds, but by the white savages of the border. 
If there is anything made clear by the united 
testimony of private letters and public inves- 
tigation, by the almost unanimous concurrence 
of the emigrants, by the confessions of their 
adversaries, and by the faithful scrutiny of the 
Committee of Congress, it is, that the first 
election for the legislative constitution of the 
territory was not an election but an invasion. 
An election is the free choice of their rulers by 
a people who have a right, under the laws, to 
such a choice. But this election was turned 
into a military occupation. A foreign army, 
somewhat irregular as to its discipline, but 
with all the equipage and appliances of a be- 
sieging host, marched into the polling places, 
as the French army, in IS-iS, filed through the 
streets of Rome, or as the English are in the 
habit of taking possession of some Indian zillah. 
It came in detachments, w^ith drums beatins: 
and colors flying — with arms and ammunition, 
and baggage-wagons — and pitched its tents and 



KANSAS MUST BE FREE. 327 

posted sentries, and, driving the inhabitants 
from the ballot-boxes, voted. If the judges of 
the election were docile, it made the most ad- 
mirable eftbrt to preserve the peace ; but, if 
they were refractory, others were put up in 
their stead. Having accomplished its purpose, 
not without a number of incidental outrages, 
this valiant band returned to its Missouri home. 
In every assembly district, it appears from 
the evidence before the Congressional com- 
mission, these frauds were perpetrated. Of 
course, the legislature, which resulted from 
them, was a seditious and usurping body. It 
had no more authority to act than the maraud- 
ing troop by which it was appointed. In no 
sense was it a representation of the people. 
The pretext that the certificate of " due elec- 
tion" given by Governor Reeder to two-thirds 
of the members, in the absence of objections 
to the returns, conferred upon them a legal 
character, might have been true, if he had been 
a judicial instead of a mere ministerial agent. 
But his act was only declaratory of a subsisting 
fact, and not decisive of an actual right. It 
was formal, not final. It were monstrous to 



328 rOLITICAL ESSAYS. 

suppose that the liberties of a \Yliole nation 
could be suspended upon a mere clerical func- 
tion. Imagine that Governor Reeder had set 
aside all the returns, and given his certificates 
to friends of his own, would that have consti- 
tuted them a valid legislature"? Could not the 
people, in that case, either ia their primary 
capacity, or through an appeal to Congress, 
vacate his act ? Assuredly they could ; for 
there is no maxim or principle of law more 
firmly established, than that fraud in any pro- 
ceeding vitiates it from the beginning. Be- 
sides, if we admit that Governor Eeeder was 
the proper and exclusive judge of the legality 
of the legislature, it follows that his primary 
recognition of it w^as nullified by his subse- 
quent refusal to recognize it, after it had re- 
moved, contrary to the organic act, the place 
of its assemblage. The same law which em- 
powered him to certify the election-returns, 
empowered him to fix the place of legislation, 
and if his action was binding upon the people 
in one case, it was no less binding in the other. 
That this pretended legislature knew itself to 
be illegally constituted, is evidenced by the 



KANSAS MUST BE FREE. 329 

whole course of its proceedings. They were 
the proceedings of conspirators, and not of a 
deliberative assembly. More tyrannical, atro- 
cious, and malignant acts, were scarcely ever 
decreed by an eastern satrap against a subject 
province, than were passed by these men, in 
the name of law, against their own assumed 
constituents. From the earliest ages, among 
every people making the slightest pretensions 
to freedom, the right of free speech, the puri- 
ty of suffrage, the independence of the press, 
the exemption of the citizen from arbitrary 
arrests, from vindictive penalties, and from 
unusual oaths, have been cardinal and sacred 
objects. In those darker days of monarchical 
despotism, when our forefathers of England 
laid the foundation of that glorious polity 
which sheds a lustre upon the Anglo-Saxon 
name, these were the guiding stars of all their 
struggles. At this day, on the continent of 
Europe, the heaviest grievance of the oppress- 
ed multitudes, for the removal of which they 
have often undertaken desperate and sanguina- 
ry revolutions, is their deprivation of the rights 
of free opinion and utterance in regard to the 



330 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

action of government, and the institutions of 
society. Yet, these legislators of Kansas — in 
view of these holy and imprescriptible rights — 
rights which are the very essence of a free 
commonwealth — with the hot haste of pirates, 
eager for the life of their victims — struck them 
out of existence. Those precious defenses of 
the citizen — speech, the press, the bar, the jury 
— were alike invaded w^ith inquisitorial zeal. 
It was enacted, 1st, that any person who should 
print, write, or speak anything " against the 
right to hold slaves in the territory," should 
be deemed guilty of a felony : 2nd, that no 
person should exercise the elective franchise, 
or be allowed to practice in the courts, with- 
out first swearing to support the fugitive slave 
law : 3rd, that any person speaking or writing 
anything calculated "to promote a disorderly, 
dansrerous, or rebellious disaffection amonof 
slaves," should be punishable with im2:)rison- 
ment at hard labor for five years ; 4th, that 
any person aiding a slave to escape, or assisting 
at an insurrection, should suffer death; and 
5tli, that no person opposed to slavery could 
sit on a jury in which offenses against these 



KANSAS MUST BE FREE. 331 

acts were brought in question ! and, finally, as 
if these provisions themselves were not enough, 
the future elections of the territory were so 
arranged, that persons opposed to slavery were 
disfranchised, and everybody else, whether an 
actual citizen or not, on the payment of a 
nominal tax, was suffered to vote. The entire 
scheme, it will be seen, had nothing in it of 
legislation for a community of mingled opin- 
ions, but was throughout a proscription and 
persecution of a particular class. Everything 
was to be prostituted to slavery, as in the 
darker ages of the world everything was pros- 
tituted to a form of religion. Slavery was the 
state, the church, the all — the one thing to 
be sustained at all hazards. No man can read 
the clauses of these enactments, as they stand on 
the statute-book, without deriving the pro- 
foundest conviction that the authors of them 
were playing a desperate game, in which no 
consideration of principle or honor entered, but 
the whole was fraud. 

Cheated of all legitimate government, there 
remained two courses for the actual settlers to 
pursue — to appeal to the federal authority to 



332 POLITICAL ESSAYS, 

maintain the law, grossly violated, and to un- 
dertake to institute a government for them- 
selves, and both these courses were pursued. 
Unfortunately, and by a single forgetfulness of 
duty, to use no harsher term, the federal au- 
thority had already committed itself to the 
cause of the ruffians. "Whether it was imbe- 
cility, or roguery, or sheer tyranny, or all these 
combined, which constrained him, does not ap- 
pear; but the President, who in Massachusetts 
had used the army of the United States to cap- 
ture a runaway negro, could find no occasion 
for his interference in the armed resistance of a 
mob to an ordinance of Congress. On the 
other hand, he did whatever he could, indirect- 
ly, to encourage the sedition. He patronized 
its agents — he instructed his own agents to 
assist and abet them — and at last, when a di- 
rect blow in behalf of slavery would be most 
effective, he found the right, so long held in 
abeyance, to order an army into the territory. 
IMeanwhile, the settlers had adopted the 
second alternative, of framing a government 
for themselves. In technical strictness, the 
authority for this proceeding ought to have 



KANSAS MUST BE FREE. 333 

come through Congress ; but as tlie popuUir 
doctrine, as the doctrine on which the territory 
itself was organized, was that of " squatter 
sovereignty," and as precedents existed in the 
cases of Michigan, Arkansas, and California — 
in which states had been formed without the 
aid of Congress — they concluded, with Madi- 
son, that in such emergencies *' forms ought to 
give way to substance."* With all due pub- 
licity, and in the most perfect ord^r, a new 
government was formed, its officers appointed, 
and application for admission into the Union 
made. 

But in the way of the execution of this de- 
sign, harmless as it appears, there stood two 
formidable lions. In the first place, the 
wretches, who had, at the outset, plundered 
them of their rights, gathering strength and 
number from the encouragement of the pro- 
slavery party everywhere, were again ready to 
pounce upon them ; and, in the second place, 
the United States' authorities— judges, juries, 
marshals, colonels, sergeants, and dragoons — un- 

* Federalist, No. 40. 



334 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

cler Dew definitions of treason, and the most 
audacious stretches of law, and to the utter 
disregard of justice, were sent to assist at the 
cremation. Between the two, the friends of 
the Free State cause were crushed to the earth, 
their leaders were arrested, their property pil- 
laged, their houses burnt, and their families dis- 
persed. The details of the infamous rout still 
fill the journals. A systematic suppression of 
freedom, begun by the outlaws of the frontier, 
has been conducted to a bloody end by the ad- 
ministration. It would seem as if freedom in 
Kansas had become an irritation and a nuisance 
to men in power, just as the simple worship 
of the Albigeois was to the fierce zeal of the 
Dominicans, or as the trade, the wealth, and 
the independence of the Netherlands became 
to Phihp the Second. Its presence there dis- 
turbs and rebukes them, as the presence of 
Mordecai at the gate of the king did Haman. 

Doubtless, there has been considerable ex- 
aggeration in the reports of the trials and suf- 
ferings to which the settlers have been exposed ; 
doubtless, there have been excesses, both of 
word or deed, committed by themselves ; for, 



KANSAS MUST BE FREE. 335 

ia times of high excitement, a uniform temper- 
ance is not to be expected ; but the single fact 
which glares upon us through all the turmoil, 
and all the conflicting rumors, is, that a peace- 
ful and honest movement in behalf of freedom 
has been extinguished by force. Disguise it as 
we may, palliate or justify it as we may, this 
is still the fact ; and it falls upon the heart 
with a frightful, almost stunning effect. In 
the middle of the nineteenth century, in a 
land preeminent for its pretensions to liber- 
ty, an effort to save the future key of the 
continent, from the universally acknowledged 
evils of *human bondage, has been precipitate- 
ly, wantonly, disastrously, arrested, if not for- 
ever baffled. It is a fact which compels us to 
inquire, whether our pride in the supposed su- 
periority of our age and nation, in the spirit 
of justice, and in the love of rational liberty, 
may not prove, after all, but a pleasing self- 
deception. 

These are the public or general causes of 
that erethism of politics which marks a fever- 
ish access ; but, to increase its energy, there 
came upon the top of the deplorable events in 



336 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

Kansas, an event of a personal nature, which 
possessed also a national significance. We 
refer to the disgraceful attack upon Mr. Sum- 
ner, in the Senate of the United States. That 
any man, were he the most despicable member 
of that body, should be stricken to the floor by 
the hands of a member of the other House, 
for the just exercise of his constitutional rights, 
and for the faithful expression of the senti- 
ments of his constituents, is an offense which 
ought to excite a universal reprobation. But 
when that man is one of its most accomplish- 
ed members — a gentleman by habit and educa- 
tion, a scholar, a profound jurist, an eloquent 
speaker, an upright citizen, as remarkable 
for the amiableness as he is for the dignity 
of his deportment, and W'hose fame has pene- 
trated both hemispheres — the offense grows 
into an enormity beyond the reach of lan- 
guage to describe. We share in the feeling 
of earnest indignation with which it has been 
almost everywhere rebuked at the North, but 
this feeling is not unmingled with a deeper one 
of humiliation and alarm. We are humiliated by 
the thought that the manliness^ the honor, the 



KANSAS MUST BE FREE. 337 

good sense of the republic should have so far 
degenerated in any quarter, as to admit, and 
what is worse, to approve a brutality so gross. 
And we are alarmed lest, in the reaction of the 
public mind against the outrage, it should be 
led to nurse its exasperated feelings into a set- 
tled purpose of revenge. The best of men 
often retain so much of the animal in their 
composition that they are moved beyond them- 
selves at the sight of blood — 

" si torrida parvus 

Yenit in ora cruor, rediunt rabiesque, furorque" — 

and how much more apt are the multitude to 
be carried to an excess of rage ? There was 
malice and uncharitableness enough in public 
sentiment before, without adding this fuel to 
the flame. There was violence enough in the 
tone of public discussion, without extending 
it to actual blows. That game once begun, 
where is it to end ? The people of the free 
states, fortunately, are, by their religious edu- 
cation, and by their habits of industry, inclined 
to peace; they are docile, patient, and forbear- 
ing — qualities which men of violence are apt 
15 



338 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

to despise — but, once aroused, and, our word 
for it, that the energy, which has enabled 
them to conquer themselves, to conquer the 
inclemencies of nature, to conquer by their 
enterprise every rebellious sea and every de- 
fying mountain, will be carried into the pur- 
suits of strife. It is a most dangerous and for- 
midable demon which the slave states invoke, 
when they conjure up the spirit of physical 
force. Like the Afrite of the eastern tale, it 
may seem to them only a bottle of smoke in 
the beginning, but that smoke, once let loose 
upon the air, wall raise its head into clouds, and 
its hands will become like winnowing forks, 
and its nostrils trumpets, and its eyes a con- 
suming fire. The one great lesson taught of 
human history, written in crimson letters on a 
thousand pages, is, that " he who takes the 
sword shall perish by the sword." Unless the 
journalists and the public men, who have ap- 
plauded this murderous deed, are prepared for 
the worst extremities, they will recall their 
insane and passionate approval. We cannot 
conceive a folly more suicidal for them than 
that which would appeal to the arbitrament 



KANSAS MUST BE FREE. * 339 

by combat. If they drecid free discussion, if 
they distrust the decisions of the l)allot-box, 
they have still less to hope from a resort to 
arms. 

It will be seen, that it is not a consolatory 
view we have been compelled to take of our 
public affairs, and yet they are not altogether 
hopeless. If the ruffianism of Washington and 
the borders should have the effect of awaken- 
ing opinion to the real issues before the coun- 
try, it will compensate for much of its evil. 
Under the existing organization of the govern- 
ment, and with the prevalent usages of parties, 
which have thrown them almost entirely into 
the hands of corrupt managers, nothing is to 
be expected from those sources. A regenerate 
and united public sentiment is alone equal to 
the task of retrieving our unhappy decline. 
The time has come when every honest man, 
whatever his party politics, who deems the Re- 
public worthy of his care, should determine to 
arrest the downward tendency of things. He 
is solemnly called upon, by every exigency of 
the times, to decide whether the materialism, 
the barbarism, the worst and h)we8t impulsesof 



340 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

the social state, or tlie higher and better influ- 
ences of our democratic civilization, are to pre- 
vail. Shall the generous and manl}^ confidence 
of our fathers in the doctrine of human rights 
continue to be ours, or shall we surrender it 
to the narrow and base lusts of an oligarchy ? 
Shall the magnificent empires growing up on 
tlie w^estern shores of the Mississippi become 
the homes of an industrious, peaceful, benefi- 
cent freedom, or shall they be given over to the 
chain-gang and sterility? These are the ques- 
tions of the day, and the trial questions of our 
destiny. If the wicked scheme for the perpet- 
uation and extension of slavery — of which the 
Kansas-Nebraska bill was the first clause — is 
to be carried into complete effect — if the noble 
yearning for freedom, which is the inspiration 
and life of the North, is to be suppressed at 
Washington, and excluded from the territories 
by force — let Ichabod be written upon the 
doors of our temples, for the glory will be de- 
parted. It is iuipossible that slavery and a 
vital, genuine republicanism should thrive and 
spread together; it is impossible that bond la- 
bor and free labor should work cheek-by-jowl 



KANSAS MUST I5E FREE. 341 

on the same soil ; it is impossible tbat a spe- 
cial class should rule the 'people, and the peo- 
ple still retain their supremacy and power. In 
a nation otherwise free, slavery may prolong a 
subordinate existence for years, but when it 
leaps into the ascendant, the spring of the na- 
tional life is broken. A disease may linger 
long on the extremities of a system, which 
would be fatal to it the moment it touches the 
greac central organs. Confined to its original 
localities, the slave-system of the United States 
was pernicious only, or chiefly, wdthin the 
limits of those localities ; but when the spirit 
and the power of it invaded the general gov- 
ernment, and sought a diffusion over the terri- 
tories, it became a universal evil — an evil 
which, unless arrested, and again confined to 
its primitive range, will dry up the sources of 
the most noble and glorious progress. 

As we read the chronicles of the nations, 
from the dim traditions of the early eastern 
dynasties, through the splendid annals of 
Greece and Rome, down to the latest record 
of our own era, we are struck by the uniformi- 
ty with which, after a longer or shorter career, 



342 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

they have all succumbed to the influences of 
foreign conquest or o*f civil war. We see them 
grow for a time with marvelous rapidity, they 
attain to a broad and stately dominion, their 
storehouses swell with abundance, and their 
arts shed lustre on the age ; but soon they sink 
as rapidly as they rose, and are left like ruins 
upon the desert — desolate and pitiable — the 
wolf howling from their deserted chambers, 
aud the bitterns crying from their broken 
pools. The writers of history describe the 
mournful experience, and, wisely or unwisely, 
speculate upon its causes. They seek for a so- 
lution of the problem in fanaticism, in bad 
morals, in luxury, in the degeneracy of race, 
and in the inscrutable decrees of Providence — 
and read us many a lesson out of the conclu- 
sions at which they arrive. But the prevalence 
of a cause, as universal as the effect, and as 
deep and powerful as the selfishness of man, 
they have not always signalized. It is that 
separating and corrosive spirit, which denies 
the equal claims of all humanity. " Whether 
we regard," says one, " the caste-systems 
of Egypt and India, the martial despotism of 



KANSAS MUST DE FREE. 343 

Persia, the rule of wealth and craft in Phoeni- 
cia, or the class-divisions of Greece, and Pome, 
and Judea, one obvious characteristic will be 
found pervading the ancient nations : every- 
where the social fabric was built upon the 
assumption of the natural inequality of man, 
upon the necessary, because divinely appoint- 
ed, inferiority of certain races. Not in the su- 
perstitious tenets and observances of heathen 
theology, nor in the absence of a law of right 
and wrong, nor in any want of the higher 
powers of humanity, nor in the fatal uncon- 
sciousness of their weakness, nor in any diffi- 
culties, from w^hich we now have exemption, 
thrown in the way of a wider benevolence, nor 
in the lack of such advantages as we are li- 
censed to reap from the discovery of printing, 
etc. — but in the universal dogma of human ine- 
quality, we find the sufficing reason for the im- 
perfect freedom and the inevitable decline of 
the greatest empires of antiquity." And, wdiile 
it is the peculiarity of Christianity that it did 
proclaim the divine brotherhood of man, not 
on the ground of any expediency or conve- 
nience, but upon the broad foundation of the 



344 POLITICAL ESSAYS. 

common fatherhood of God, and the common 
redemption by Christ — it is also true of all the 
Christian nations, that they have risen or fallen, 
according to their fidelity to this eternal stand- 
ard. It was the departure from this, by the 
dissolute emperors, which rendered the Western 
Empire an easy prey to the barbarians, and, 
after a protracted but ineffectual struggle, gave 
the Eastern Empire to the Turks ; it w^as ad- 
herence to this which lifted the Papacy into 
European dominion, and the abandonment of it 
which toppled it from its throne ; it was the 
popular sympathies of the Italian republics 
which made them, for nearly tw^o centuries, the 
mothers of all industry, learning, and art, and 
the growth of aristocracy w^hich consumed 
their strength: it was the bigotry, and far- 
reaching despotism of Philip w^hich prostrated 
the grand Spanish monarchy to a degradation 
and feebleness from w^iich there has been no 
resurrection ; and it was the heartless tyran- 
ny of the Louises which kindled the train 
of the w^orld-exploding French revolution. If 
the Romanic nations were once like Lucifer, 
the sons of tho morninff, and have since fallen 



KANSAS MUST ]?E FREE. 345 

like Lucifer, it was because they admitted to 
their souls Lucifer's infernal ambition. If the 
Teutonic nations, and especially the Anglo- 
Saxon branch, have carried the principles of 
religion, of literature, of stable government, 
of progressive civilization over the world, it is 
because they, less than others, have accepted 
the downward, and backward, and paralyzing 
spirit of caste. Humanity is one, it is indisso- 
luble, it is sacred ; who lays his lightest finger 
upon it to do it harm, seals his own doom ; he 
degrades and weakens himself in others ; he 
touches the ark of God, in which he has de- 
posited his most precious treasures. 

When our country ceases to cherish a love 
for the rights of man, she will have parted 
with the secret of her strength. When she 
takes to her heart any other w^orship than that 
of humanity, justice, truth, she will have ad- 
mitted the serpent into her Eden. Whatever 
may be the policy and the course of individual 
states, there is for the nation but one policy 
and one course. Our birthright of freedom is 
our only and eternal safeguard. 
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